The cold bit sharply into the numb fingers of the woman clad in ragged and tattered clothing as she dragged her heavy feet through the snowdrifts and ice accumulated at the curb. Her eyes were sightless behind the tangle of graying, auburn hair that was cascading down her forehead as she clicked her cane against the curb, advancing stiffly toward the sidewalk. As the cars whined by, their drivers were unconcerned for the woman their tires managed to shower with dirty, gray slush from the street’s gritty surface. The salty mire penetrated the rags she’d wrapped around her ankles and shoes to protect them from the ice and cold, causing the salt to burn the blistered, raw skin of her feet and ankles. She carried an old cane someone had painted white, but all that was left of the white paint now was scaled patches of graying flakes. As she shuffled along the sidewalk her cane connected with the building’s walls in rhythmic clicks, seeking an alley to shelter her from the icy wind’s sharpening teeth. The brusque coldness gnawed at her body through the layers of worn garments, and she shivered.
“There has to be an alley somewhere around here.” Her thoughts felt cobwebbed from the effects of the cold, “these buildings certainly can’t go on forever!”
The bustling crowds on the sidewalk bumped and bounced her repeatedly into the icy surface of the brick building’s face as she shuffled painfully along.
“I must be invisible to them!” Her frustration was goaded as another pedestrian jostled her into the hard, frigid wall, allowing the protruding bricks to bruise her. No one ever bothered asking her forgiveness for the rudeness in battering her against the icy, cruel surface. Their lack of consideration was a testament to their self-centered detachment. Hunger gnawed at her belly relentlessly, leaving her stomach persistently painful and hollow. She hadn’t slept in warmth since the summer ended, and the numbing cold was now quickly ebbing away her remaining strength. Her scant worldly possessions were all nestled in the dirty, worn, canvas sack that was draped heavily over her shoulder. They were quickly becoming more of a burden than she could bear in her frail, declining condition.
When the cane finally found its mark and guided her to a void to her right, she slowly shuffled down the narrow alley. Trash and litter was heaped along the darkened walls, and thick platelets of ice glistened where puddles once stood. The pungent odor of mold and decay was overpowering, due to the alley’s absence of sunlight. The brick walls stretching to ten stories above, and their height never allowed the warmth of the sun’s penetrating rays to find their way to the damp alley floor.
The woman’s prodding cane finally met with the dumpster that loomed like a dark hulk at the end of the alley. The dumpster sat in front of a wooden fence that impeded her progress. She continued prodding with her cane in order to familiarize herself with the area surrounding the dumpster. She happened upon a large, empty, cardboard box that was leaning against the fence where the wind had stashed it. The woman was becoming increasingly weak and tired. She rattled the cane around within the box’s empty void to assure herself that it was indeed empty before weakly swinging the canvas bag from her shoulder and dropping it to the cold asphalt surface with painful effort. She reached down to the frozen alley floor and felt her way cautiously onto her knees, crawling into the mouth of the cardboard box and then pulling the canvas sack in behind her to obstruct the chilly path of the wind.
“Maybe this wind will stop soon,” she mused. Her mind felt as though she was in a gauzy haze as she tucked her numb fingers and hands beneath the frayed remains of the sweater that hung heavily across her frail shoulders. Once inside the box, she pulled her knees up to her chest in a fetal position to conserve what warmth her body afforded her before wearily attempting to sleep. The cars on the street outside the alley sloshed noisily through the slush. Her head throbbed with the insult of their shrill horns as they honked at one another in annoyance, sounding strangely to her like the voices of distant, angry geese. The wind outside the box slammed it, slapping and thumping the cardboard sides repeatedly against her in a relentless, monotonous rhythm. The bird-like chirping sounds of someone’s fan belt incorporated itself into her state of drowsiness.
“Someone told me about a most beautiful bird once. A bird that returns to the warm, spring sun of a canyon in Southern Arizona,” her mind wandered groggily through the sensations of maze-like cobwebs. “A Trogon, I’m certain that’s what the bird is called. Its a bird that wanders from its tropical home somewhere in South America every spring to nest in the same canyons of Arizona. Oh, how I would love to be like that bird and find my way back to warmth, and home again!” She pulled the frayed sweater tightly around her, folding her arms across her chest, emitting an involuntary shiver.
“If only I knew where home actually was.” But she didn’t know. Even though her mind was succumbing to the numbness created by the cold, her thoughts intermittently managed to permeate the anesthetizing dullness, until the tedious repetition of the box thumping against her lulled her into a fitful sleep. It wasn’t a sleep of restfulness, but a slumber filled suddenly with images from so long ago. The memories of events from her past, although previously painfully absent, came back to her as fleeting reflections, parading through her sleep like quips of news clips she’d seen before; fragments of things happening in a time long past. A time before her sight waned to the present dimness of merely fleeting shadows and fuzzy images. The recollections took her back to times in her life outside of the present, taking her away from the foul smells of the alley. Back to a time away from the cold that was biting into her flesh like razor sharp teeth through the layers of tattered cloth wrapping her shivering body.
Drifting off into an abstract, surreal haze of dreams, her memories began to return through a rapidly, reeling montage of images. Fleetingly bringing back the events in her life as though watching them through a kaleidoscope of colors. There, she saw herself as a child growing up on the farm with staunch, cold, indifferent people, and the pain of her loss at the death of her beloved brother, Dave. Memories of the hurt and pain of a first love lost, and then the meeting of a handsome young man named Justin Bailey, and marrying him despite, the absence of love; with the assumption she would learn to love him, given time. Then came the memories of a bad marriage filled with painful disillusionment, followed by the birth of two beautiful daughters, and then suddenly, widowhood. She relived in her dreams falling in love with Todd Ashurst, and their life together, before and after their marriage on the ranch in New Mexico. And then she painfully relived the events that followed, which brought her to this point in her life.
Read all about Maggie in her Trilogy, for sale on Amazon.com: Maggie: The Early Years, Red Sky: The Sequel to Maggie, and Return of the Trogon: Sequel to Red Sky.
