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Message: <blockquote data-quote="maxfieldjadenfox" data-source="post: 2598643" data-attributes="member: 18003">OK, being technically challenged again, I'm having trouble getting Notepad to translate my formatting... And I cant figure out how to insert the links... But I'll try. OK, tried and failed. So, I put the places where I referred to the oictures in bold. Hope that's good enough... I'm not from around here.Round One, Set Five--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Herobizkit vs. Tolen Mar vs. maxfieldjadenfox                                               The CallingAnnie cried. She cried for weeks, til her eyes felt like red flannel and her nose forgot what it felt like not to be plugged. Something inside of her broke the day Dog died, something that couldn’t be fixed. He was just a mangy little mutt, a little terrier, maybe some Chihuahua, a smidgen of poodle. It didn’t matter. She loved Dog with a fierceness that shocked her, especially since she couldn’t remember ever having loved anyone before him. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She had loved her Granny. But it seemed like Dog was the only one to have ever really loved her back.“Ugly!” “Leather Face!” “Hey, Frankenstein, look over here.” She hugged her books to her chest as she ran the locker gauntlet. Now and then, someone, not content with verbal taunts, stuck out a foot and laughed as she went flying. Her only respite was in class. Her teachers never really looked at her, but they couldn’t deny that she was smart. Yes, that girl was preternaturally intelligent, which made her all the more spooky. The first day of school, the teacher’s lounge was buzzing.“She’s in my home room, for God’s sake! How am I supposed to look at that first thing in the morning?”“I know she’s just a kid, but she gives me the creeping heebies.” “I had her last year. She understands theoretical physics better than Einstein. I wish I could stand to be within five feet of her, she could do great things with the right mentor, but ugh, you know?”                                                     ~It was twilight. The swamp water glowed a soft blue green as it trickled around downed branches. The frogs kept up a constant chorus of peeps and belches, and the crickets chirped the temperature. On the porch of the shack, Annie sat with a basket of greens, willing herself to go inside and fix something to eat. Pickings were pretty slim since Granny died, but she made by. There were the chickens out back, and the nanny goat. There was Granny’s garden, but she didn’t have Granny’s hand with plants. She sat and watched as the stars came out, counting until she was in the thousands. Finally, she heaved herself up off the porch and limped inside. She had killed one of the roosters yesterday, so there was fried chicken leftover in the Frigidaire. The generator wheezed and puffed, but it managed to run the fridge and the lights. It died on a regular basis, but she, with her talent for fixing and making things, always managed to get it running again. After supper, she cleared off the table and brought out the machine. It was built from parts she had found down at the dump, lifted from classrooms back when she was still going to school, and some copper pipe she had bought with money she made collecting bottles and cans for recycling. That was a good way to pick up some money, but the second time she went there, the guy who sat in the recycling truck wouldn’t wait on her. He pretended she wasn’t there until she left.                                                     ~Annie was sitting on the stained, green, sculptured shag carpet, playing with the doll her Papa had made for her. It was a strange little figure with a straw hat and multicolored shirt and pants. He said it reminded him of his Pere, back in Haiti. He had made her some flat shapes of balsa wood too, a circle, a square, a triangle. She knew the names of all of them. Her mother was sitting across the room on a thrift shop sofa, twiddling her foot and smoking a cigarette. She had a bottle of Southern Comfort next to her. She was drinking straight from the bottle. Even though she was only two, her mother’s hostility was obvious to Annie. “Where’d you get that evil eye of your’n, girl? Must be from your Pap’s family. Nobody in my family ever had one of those.” She stopped then, took a drag of her cigarette and shook her head.“How come you don’t talk? Say 'Mama.' Girl, you must be dumb as a post.” She took a slug from the bottle. “Your Pap is a no good SOB, you know that? Went and got his self arrested for ‘tempted murder. Now what am I gonna do?” Her face collapsed and she began to sob. “How’m I s’posed to take care of you?”Annie looked at her with her one good eye. The other one, white, with no iris or pupil, seemed blind. Since she hadn’t spoken yet, nobody knew what she could see through it, if she was looking the right way. The circle she was playing with rolled from her hands. She pointed at the little manikin, and it stood and jerked it’s way across the room after it, and brought it back to her. She smiled.For a moment, her mother just stared, but then her face twisted with fury.“Witch!” she screamed. “Demon child!” She rose from the sofa and bore down on Annie, yanking her up by the arm. “I knew,” she shrieked, her whiskey breath hot on Annie’s face. “I knew there was something wrong about you!” She dragged the little girl into the kitchen, and took the matches off the back of the stove. Then she hauled her into the yard. Frantically, she began to make a pile of twigs and branches, still holding tight to Annie, who watched with her blank eye. When the pile of kindling was tall, her mother tossed a match into the center of it, and as it blazed, she picked Annie up and threw her into it. “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,” she screamed.Pain. It was an interesting feeling. Annie observed as the hair on her right side caught fire, felt the flesh on the right side of her face begin to melt. She put her arms out to her mother and pointed. Her mother staggered into the fire and was engulfed.                                                   ~Annie looked down the length of her machine, and fiddled with a few of the crossbars. Then she looked through it with her left eye. Yes, there he was.                                                   ~When she came to live with her Granny, she was burnt and bandaged. “Lord,” Granny said, “if that ain’t about the ugliest chile I evah saw!”The social worker glared.“Mrs. Tridden. I would appreciate it if you would be careful what you say in front of the child. She’s been through a lot and with you her only kin…”“What happened to her Pap?” Granny asked, “My good for nothin’ son?”“Well, ma’am, he was serving time down in Folsom. Attempted murder. He died a couple of weeks ago. Not sure what he did to make the other prisoners turn on him so… We don’t know if the child’s mother heard, but something made her burn herself up. Almost took this baby with her too.” “No surprise,’ said Granny, and spit a big blob of chewing tobacco at the social workers feet. “Guess you might as well bring her in then.” Granny’s cabin was small and dark. Herbs hung from the ceiling beams and the only light was from a massive stone fireplace that took up nearly one whole wall. “Kin I get you some tea? I make it my own self.” Granny took a cracked mug from the cupboard.“No, thank you,” the social worker stammered, “I can’t stay long.” She looked around the poor little room. “Perhaps she would be better off in foster care?” “None of my folk gonna be in foster care evah agin. Not after what happened to her Pap.”“Her father was in foster care?” “Fo’ a little bit. Long nuff to mess him up right bad.”The social worker clutched Annie. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea…” she began Annie pointed her finger at the woman and she staggered to the door, her gait a peculiar stiff legged shamble. Granny gave a wondering little smile to Annie. “I take care of mine.” Granny said, as the door slammed behind her.“You got the sendin’ magic girl?” Granny asked. Annie nodded.“You got the callin’ magic too?” Annie nodded again.“That’s real special. All us Tridden’s got one or t’other, but I don’t recollect any one of us evah havin’ both.” She patted her head, but pulled her hand away as if it were hot. “There now, chile,” she said, “there now.”                                                     ~Annie held Dog’s collar, then laid it in front of her, stroking his name gently. Not long now, she thought.                                                     ~It was a hard scrabble existence, and Granny resented her. She could tell, even though Granny did her best not to let her know. She taught her to cook, and to sew, to sweep the battered wood floor, worn smooth by generations of Tridden feet. She also taught her to carve, as she had taught her son. The wood was special, harvested only under a full moon, and only fallen branches.“We don’t harm a livin’ tree,” Granny said.When she learned to read, Annie felt like a bird let out of it’s cage. Books were the best thing ever. Lost in them, she could go anywhere and be anybody. It didn’t matter that the other children were afraid of her, and mean to her. It didn’t matter that most of the teachers wouldn’t look at her, she could read. By the time she was 10, she had read every book in the school library, and by the time she was 12, every book in the public library. One day, when she was coming out of the library doors with an armload of books, she tripped over a small dirty puppy. He was as unattractive as she was, and they were fast friends. Granny wasn’t happy to have another mouth to feed. “What chew want with dat mangy beastie?” she wanted to know.“He’s my friend,” Annie said. Granny said there wasn’t enough food to go around, but Annie found a way to feed Dog, even if she went hungry herself.She carved a beautiful replica of him, and took the carving with her anyplace Dog wasn’t allowed. He made her feel safe.                                                        ~She set the carving of Dog, never out of her sight now, inside of the machine on a plank of alder wood, just past the eyepiece. She put her hands on either side of it and concentrated. The copper began to glow. A vortex opened at the back of it, and she heard distant barking.                                                       ~“You know, chile, people will hurt you if you’re different. So you be just as not different as you can.” It was an easy enough thing for Granny to say. Neither of them were good at doing it. It was Hallo’een. It was also her seventeenth birthday. The townsfolk were stirred up because there was a strange sickness going around, made people fall asleep and not wake up. It was easy to blame Granny and Annie. They came, like some parody of an old horror movie, toting pitchforks and carrying torches, and demanded to see Granny. Annie turned some of them back, but there were so many of them. Granny came out and they set upon her, set upon her like rabid dogs, and threw her bony old body into the swamp, with the gators. Annie ran back into the shack with Dog, and bolted the door. Her Granny was gone. She was miserable. She couldn’t go to town, and she couldn’t go to the library. She would have died of loneliness, she told Dog, if it wasn’t for him. But the same strange sickness that had got the people got Dog. One morning, Annie couldn’t rouse him from the gunny sack where he slept. She sat by him, calling him day after day but this was one place her calling magic didn’t seem to work. Maybe he had gone too far away to hear her.                                                     ~The machine was too bright to look at now. “Come on, come on boy," she called, closing her right eye, and beckoning with a pointed finger. The carving shuddered, and trotted toward her. “I knew it’d work! She cried. She hugged the wriggling wooden dog to her chest. “Just one more thing boy, now I know I can do it.”Under the light of the full moon, she found a branch, tall and thin, and that night, she set to bringing Granny back.                                                    ~</blockquote>

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