A Star Seed and A Witch

The heat rose from the Pahokee roads in slow, heavy waves. I could taste green sugarcane, wet black earth, and underneath them the older iron of the lake’s long memory.

I was the third boy. Five. Dirty-blond. A Star Seed still banked, pulsing against my awareness like a star that had not yet been given wind.

Willie Mae. She stood in that weather like a law. The land had a grandma, and the grandma had a name, and the name was older than any running I would do later.

Pahokee means grassy waters. The lake pressed the town like a living wound that never fully closed. I heard more than wind in the cane. I did not yet have words for what I heard.

The letters on the page would not hold still. The muck would. Rows. Water. The way a field repeats itself until a boy can see the pattern and not just the green.

Some rooms made a mind feel broken. One room did not. Belonging arrived like weather. So did the water, far from the lake, where the sea had lessons the page had refused to give.

Brothers. A night road through the cane. A cart that threw mud like a joke the land was in on. A field under lights. The ordinary Saturday was never only ordinary.

I was a Star Seed only in the way a bruise is a color. I knew I had come from somewhere else. I did not yet know what the land would ask.

I will not tell you the rest here. A book is a pact: some rooms stay closed until you agree to enter. The opening is a boy, a grandma, a pattern in the muck. The rest is the bound work.