Murder Recall

Outcome

Who is Shamina and why is she in this story? Shamina was a healer, greatly appreciated by the people who knew her. Her mother before her was also a healer and taught Shamina the necessary skills. Shamina's grandmother had been a healer and so on back through the generations to the earliest ancestors, one generation passing on the knowledge to the next. Shamina had unofficially adopted Maya before the time when Maya learned to talk. No one knew who Maya was, where she had come from or who her parents and family were. One day she appeared out of nowhere, aimlessly wandering the paths of the village, with no one to look after her. As soon as Shamina saw Maya, she took little Maya for her own, named her and raised her. Shamina had been living alone for a long time and was most happy to have Maya in her life. So though Shamina taught Maya everything she could, since Maya was not Shamina's birth-child, Maya did not have the essential ancestral link to the knowledge that Shamina had been born with. When Shamina died, that is, when Shamina's soul no longer inhabited the body she had for what is considered a lifetime, Shamina became a time traveler, due to the understanding of time she had acquired. All soul is immortal but only a rare few become time travelers. It's an ability Shamina realized she had but she did not understand why. Shamina never met any of her own ancestors or other time travelers when she experienced perceptions from various places in time. There was the invisible wall, consisting of something like glass, that was a barrier between her self and the events she was witnessing. She observed but was never actually participating in any time. Like the time Shamina and Gwen witnessed Maya's card reading, Shamina had warned Gwen about the glass barrier. Certain things should not be touched and certain barriers always respected.

This is a portion that never made it into the final version of Gwen's manuscript, The Locket:

"There was a time when Shamina learned first-hand the potential of the barrier between times. She was never completely convinced where on a time line she was. The chain of cause and effect established the place in time but whether that was a time before or after, she couldn't tell. One day Shamina was witnessing Davine walking along a path, savouring the sights, sounds and touch of the world around her.

"The jealousy between Davine and Sindy was unfathomable. With each layer that came to light, more from hidden sources of emotion darkened the shadow. Hatred is not far from jealousy. Morality, the social value system learned in infancy, causes jealousy and inhabits the human heart, no matter what. In all the manifestations of the twins, whether while awake or dreaming, memory or imagination, the jealousy was always surfacing. Each twin desperately wanted to be the better one, competing with their own internalized perceptions of each other for the approval of a mother long since buried. That was the glue that held their personal identity together, whether as the babies Raya and Lara, Davine and Cindy Wilson, or Cathy and Christie Milner, whatever identity given them, they were the same two people underneath. And it was all based on falsehood! One was not better than the other. Being best seemed to provide security. The needs of the best would be provided for. Striving to be better or best, the quest for improvement, being the ultimate of journeys.

"Shamina knew all this while she was watching Davine, the character in Gwen's book, as real nevertheless as any other representation of the soul that has as yet no name, something to which a word has not been assigned. Shamina had not planned to be there. Without the jealousy, would the twins feel bound to each other? What is the solution for the slow self-destruction caused by jealousy? Shamina wondered. Murder is an option. Then Shamina's mind was pulled away from her hypnotic thought, to what was happening. Davine was eating an apple when suddenly rounding a curve in the path, Davine found herself face to face with someone who looked just like her and was also moving exactly as Davine was. Her twin perhaps? Their arms were raising, their fingers touched. Shamina's arms were raising in an instinctual gesture to stop the inevitable. The tip of Shamina's left index finger touched the invisible barrier and broke the spell with a great shattering of glass. Tiny fragments hurled, scattering the scene. Davine fell choking on an apple seed that had been sucked by her breath into her lung, unable to breath and passed out. The other woman threw her apple core away, and in a rage of hate, realizing Davine was the twin who had sparked and consequently continuously fed her sense of being wrong, bad, and justifiably despised, forever worthy of punishment and banishment, she drew forth a sharp knife and stabbed Davine in the soft part of the belly just under the rib cage. Then she ran to escape the dread of her actions that forever chased her nevertheless. The force of the stabbing caused a heaving upwards and the apple seed was thrown out from Davine's lungs and out of her mouth.