The first story
A Star Seed and A Witch
This is the first story. Chapter 1 is the door: Willie Mae, the boy, the cane. The first volume stays with that origin and what grew from it. Later volumes will follow when they are ready. The title names the memoir and the series.
This is not a novel that borrowed a life. It is a life that would not stay ordinary. A Star Seed learns the cost of running. The land, which has been watching the whole time, finally speaks in a sentence short enough to carry.
The intoxication is real — brothers, a first temptation, a leaving, a courtship that put a shine on what ought to have stayed dull. So is the warning. The book holds both without sanding either one down. Living names that are not the author’s stay off this house.
Chapter names will be set in the bound edition. The movements below are the shape of the first story as it stands.
An earlier illustrated telling, The Starseed and the Witch, is on Kindle as a picture-book storyboard. This house is for the memoir.
I
The Wound
Chapter 1 is Willie Mae. He was five in Pahokee — third boy, dirty-blond, a Star Seed still banked. Heat came off the roads in waves. Green cane. Black muck. The iron memory of the lake. Willie Mae stood in that weather like a law. The wound was older than he was. The land had never closed.
II
The Seed
The light found him in a pew. Stained glass. Dust in the air. A glow at the sternum he could not explain and did not yet have to. He was a Star Seed only in the way a bruise is a color. He knew he had come from somewhere else. He did not yet know he would have to provide.
III
The Gathering
Family found him again at his brother Kelvin’s wedding. Lights in the trees. A woman at the edge of the gathering who did not clap when the others clapped. Courtship put a shine on what ought to have stayed dull. He mistook the shine for permission. The land was watching. It always had been.
IV
The Sentence
The old life ran out of road. The moon was too large. The water was around his ankles. A sentence arrived that was not quite a curse and not quite a kindness — a job, if he would take it. If you do not provide, you will not thrive.