Changeling

Chapter 1

August 28th

The sun rose and filled the valley with an ethereal presence. It was always like this, I note with amazement. For thousands of years, again and again beauty would return after a night of darkness as if it were the simplest task. And weren't the best things in life just as simple? The clean and cold smell of first frost arriving at your doorstep. The initial splash of fall on the tree outside of your house. Only nature can make me cry, it seems. But it was always nature that was there for me, wasn't it? Many times in my life, I found myself disconnected again and again, only to find the answer to all of my problems a mere step outside into the Earth's embrace. 

Sorrel squinted at the fine print. She had never been much of a writer, but this was just atrocious. She balled up the scrap paper she'd been doodling and writing on and tossed it into her bag at her side. She'd never been the creative type, but there was just no use keeping all of, well, -whatever this was- inside. It wasn't that she'd never tried to be good at something. Her whole family, creatives the lot of them, had spent hundreds buying her sports supplies, art supplies, flute lessons, anything that they thought would make her stand out. She was pretty enough, but mom wanted a prodigy like she had been. Someone to brag on to the other moms during parent teacher conferences. Instead, she'd get an admonishing from the principle for letting Sorrel get behind in her schoolwork. It was never that Sorrel was being lazy, she just wasn't listening. She was somewhere else, nose deep in a book that didn't even exist yet. The doctors called it ADHD and their solution of course was to pump a 10 year old full of glorified meth. 

That's when she stopped dreaming. 

Sorrel took a bite of toast as she basked in reflection. It crunched pleasantly in her ears as she sat at a decrepit little stone table behind the heirloom of a cottage. Maybe it was being off her meds, but she felt free here. Her problems were still in America, weren't they? And wasn't it true that things looked so much smaller at a distance? She nodded, taking a bite of the burnt portion of the toast and winced. The cottage only came with a gas stove and a cast iron skillet, so needless to say, her already poor cooking abilities were put to the test with bad results. 

She sighed as she swallowed the last of her breakfast and chased it with some tea. Anything was better than yesterday's nightmare of a flight from Chicago to Dublin. She glanced up at the cottage's stone exterior. It wasn't much, but it was perfect. It was small and still. So much so that it looked like it was part of the landscape itself. Like it would wake up from an ancient slumber, yawn and stand to tell her its story. Sorrel wished it were that easy to get the walls to talk, or to even write that sensation down in proper words.

Suddenly from around the bushes, a fluffy Australian shepherd came bounding towards her with surprising familiarity. That much hadn't changed, she noted. Dogs would always be dogs, no matter how bad the economy was or how much people had distanced themselves from one another. Dogs would always be steadfast in their quest to restore and unite man-kind. She reached a hand towards him and immediately rose to rough up his pelt. Sorrel was at times next to mute when it came to social interactions, but it really seemed that the explanation lay in the fact that there was more to show than say. A lot of people found her bland because of this, her ex-friends had certainly told her that endlessly. But honestly, nothing made her more content than to just sit and watch in silence, in quiet. There was enough entertainment in what already was.

"I hope you're not too far away from your flock. You're still on herding duty, aren't you?" She laughed. And the dog was all too content to be distracted from his duties as he rolled onto his back in invitation.

"Ok, there's always time for a belly-rub." Sorrel reasoned, administering so thorough of a job that the dog's leg began to kick whenever she scratched that sweet spot on his side.