Miracle's Guardian

Write a story from the point of view of a canine character or a mythological creature.

Due Aug. 8 at 11:59 p.m.

Once upon a time, there was a young married couple, Jerome and Katherine Ballantyne, who didn’t care about politics, culture, or accepted religions. If you had asked their neighbors about them, they would have said Jerome served his country in Korea, so he deserved our thanks. Any other known details were too odd to mention in polite company.

Those details included the flowers that never stopped blooming, the jugs of water they left outside during full moons, and the fact that they never showed up for church, any church. The neighbors preferred to stay away from the Ballantynes.

But they didn’t care about their lack of friends, either. All they cared about were their old practices and each other. No one ever taught them these practices. They just knew them, with a knowing that didn’t need words.

And soon, their love and practices brought three sons. These sons grew up just like their parents–wild, strange, quiet, and happy.

But their life journey, like all life journeys, involved a walk through pain. The three Ballantyne sons went to Vietnam and never returned.

Jerome and Katherine realized their house had become a tomb of memories. While tombs are good places to visit, they are not homes. And on the same day the military man knocked on their door, Katherine felt new life stirring in her womb.

The devastated couple decided to start over. They picked a random, remote spot on the map, bought ten acres, and packed their belongings.

When the Ballantynes arrived in Arcady Ridge, Missouri, they quickly realized they had nothing in common with their new neighbors, either. Yes, these new neighbors were of the land, but they farmed it, took from it. They didn’t love it or practice the old ways on it. So just like before, the Ballantynes didn’t bother with them. They built a two-story cedar home in a dense thicket of oaks and evergreens, then tried to resume their lives.

Katherine’s water broke on a stormy night in spring. She and Jerome saw no need for all the fuss of driving their temperamental Country Squire through the torrential rain and streaking lightning. So Katherine asked for any assistance Mother could spare, pushed twice, and brought Amelia Rosemary into the world.

With a new baby, a new home, and Jerome’s new job at the logging company, life fell into a new but comforting rhythm. The grief remained, as it always does. But their grief no longer formed their entire house; it instead claimed an honorary place at their table. Most days were happy.

But fate found the Ballantynes, even in their secluded thicket, when Amelia entered first grade.

Sending their five-year-old to St. John the Baptist School seemed like a natural choice. The parish was only three miles from home, and they could afford tuition considering Jerome’s rising status at the company. (He spoke to every tree he cut down, promising to plant two more at home in their honor. He kept this promise until the day he died. Yes, I know this, in a knowing of no words.)

But something happened to Amelia on that three-mile, hilly journey to school. She started to judge herself.

Katherine would roust her little family for breakfast, drop off Jerome, then drive Amelia to school. In those first few weeks, Amelia would chatter for the entire ride. The rabbits, the cornflowers, dawn’s red streaks in the sky–anything she observed, she spoke about. “Cows! There goes a calf! That grasshopper was as big as my face, Momma. Why do I have to wear this dress?”

“It’s a uniform,” Katherine said. “Now give your momma a kiss, and have a good day.”

After two months, Amelia stayed silent during those morning car rides. And she stopped playing in the trees after school. She stopped speaking to the wind and smelling the promises in the soil. She just went still and became pale and thin.

Calls came from the principal, too. “Amelia talks too much. Amelia can’t sit still in her chair. Amelia won’t keep her shirt tucked in. Amelia doesn’t know any of the prayers at Mass.”

Another two months later, Amelia resumed speaking during their drive. But what she said broke Katherine’s heart. “Mom, can I get a perm? Mom, can you iron my shirt? Mom, can I get new shoes?”

Both parents recognized the changes taking root in their child. But as much as they would have liked to pull them out like any other unwanted weed, they wanted Amelia to grow in her own way.

And so they continued to love Amelia, even after she transformed into a child they barely recognized. The physical differences, including the hair scrunchies and makeup on weekends, meant nothing. It was the internal weeds, the ones that told her she was never good enough, that they resented the most. The other girls teased her, and the boys ignored her. She was lonely, and she hated herself.

Her parents wanted Amelia to change schools, but Amelia insisted she wanted to stay. So they let her.

And by the time Amelia was ten, she started blaming her parents for her loneliness. Her parents, who went to Mass for her sake but barely mumbled the words. Who preferred to mend their clothes to anything they saw when shopping for Amelia. Who still grumbled back at the thunder and kept rocks in their pockets “just in case.”

Amelia stopped telling her parents about parent-teacher conferences and parish picnics. She made sure to hang out with friends anywhere but at her home. And when she became old enough to date, she pursued the boys who had ignored her. None of these boys resembled her or her parents in any way, which is what drew her to them.

After graduating from high school, she married Larry. His family’s property abutted the Ballantynes, but he hadn’t been allowed to play with Amelia as a boy. They found each other in high school, shocked to learn they were neighbors. It felt like destiny, which it was.

Unlike some of the other boys she dated, Larry was quiet and gentle. He played offensive lineman on their high school football team, but any aggression he displayed on the field was confined within the parameters of the game. He enjoyed walking through the woods with slow, even steps, and the woods reciprocated his affection. No one would accuse him of being too clever, but his heart was big and pure, and it learned to beat only for Amelia.

The storm on the day of the wedding ripped the veil from Amelia’s hair, sending it cartwheeling into the clouds.

Jerome built the couple a three-bedroom cabin similar to their own on their property. He also persuaded his manager to hire his gentle giant of a son-in-law. Taking him for a dimwit, the manager resisted until he saw Larry swing an axe. Similar to the role football once played in his life, Larry cut trees using every ounce of his strength and found no need to overstrain anywhere else.

Amelia became pregnant within the year. And when she first realized she would be a mother, she began to plan her daughter’s life. Larry didn’t understand how Amelia knew the gender. “Of course, it will be a girl,” Amelia declared. “That way, I have a chance to do everything the right way.”

“You mean, the opposite of your parents?”

“Exactly.”

Larry flinched. He loved his parents-in-law. They didn’t consider his quiet nature dull. They loved the sentimental, soft creature thriving within his lumbering frame. But Larry loved his wife, too, so he did not stop her when she ordered a trove of white and pink dresses, decorated the nursery in white and pink furniture, and scheduled her baby’s baptism at St. John’s.

On the night of the birth, you can guess what happened, can’t you? There was a storm, a terrible one. Larry had managed to purchase his family a Town and Country minivan, but its reliability was as questionable as the deceased station wagon.

But Amelia was not her mother. Despite her own mother’s pleading, Amelia demanded to be taken to a hospital.

This is a fair choice. It just wasn’t the wisest or safest one for that particular evening.

Larry and his parents-in-law knew this, but he packed up his pregnant wife and set out into the storm.

About ten miles from home, with no other houses or farms in sight, the car stalled at a stop sign. The battery had died. Frightened, Amelia catapulted into active labor. The rain poured, the lightning flashed, and the thunder rolled. Amelia’s huffs, puffs, and howls fell in sync with nature’s cries. Larry tried to wave someone down, but without headlights, his form was nothing but a vague shadow in the midnight rain.

Larry eventually gave up and returned to his wife, and he found her in distress. The baby refused to arrive. And Amelia sensed she would die if they did not receive help.

And this is where I come into the story.

Thank you for waiting so patiently. I’m proud of you for making it this far. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?

The daughter will be born, but she will not be the daughter the mother wanted. She will be a wild, strange daughter. She will be the daughter that her grandparents–her mother’s parents–always wanted. And her mother will resent her for it.

That’s what makes all origin stories difficult to read. The reader knows the hero will have to experience hardship and pain to grow. And that’s what every hero’s backstory is: a journey to pain. That’s the way of most human lives, of course.

But the heroes are different. They reach the pain, but they keep moving forward.

Also, the lucky ones don’t have to go through it alone. This girl is one of the lucky ones.

You see, I am a guardian. And my first job was to save my girl’s life before she was even born.

When Larry saw me, his cries of horror and despair transformed to tears of gratitude. Because he knew I was there to save his wife and daughter.

I stood in the middle of the highway in the pouring rain—me, a scrawny, mangy scrap of a thing–and I waited.

Did I know the first car that came slipping around the corner would stop? Did I know it would just so happen to be a doctor in that car? Yes and no.

I’m a divine being, but I’m also a dog. And that’s the way it is with the sacred in this timeline. To some, I’m a miracle. To others, I’m just a dirty, stray mutt who just happened to show up at the right time.

Honestly, I was just following instinct. A knowing without words. Sometimes, if you smell into the right wind or perk your ear to the right sound, you find that knowing, and your highest purpose.

When I jumped in the car after the doctor, I had a filthy, hole-ridden scrap of white gauze in my mouth. Amelia and Larry told themselves they didn’t recognize it. But they did, and they drove me home.

They named me Lucky, and they named her Miracle. Some called it sacrilegious, but not even Amelia’s desire for acceptance could stop her from signing that birth certificate.

We were inseparable from that day on. They tried to keep me out of the house, but I broke the windows of that new cabin so many times, they gave up. I slept by her cradle. She was my Miracle, and I was hers.

Amelia hated me because I represented everything she didn’t want her daughter to be. She tried to comb me, trim my nails, train me to fetch or sit. I wasn’t having it.

But Larry loved me, and the grandparents couldn’t get enough of me. Together, we raised Miracle to be the wild woods child she was meant to be.

When it was time for Miracle to begin school, Amelia sent her to St. John’s. Larry knew better than to protest. Katherine and Jerome, however, tried their best. “She’s too wild. She won’t belong, and you’ll regret it.” As they expected, though, Amelia didn’t listen. She wrestled her feral six-year-old into the white blouse, skirt, and braids, and sent her off to school.

The principal called that first day. Miracle had bolted. She ran so fast that the teachers lost her in the surrounding woods. Amelia sped to school in a panic, and she and half the staff went searching. When they found Miracle, she was in a meadow, braiding herself a flower crown.

Eventually, Miracle learned how to make it through a school day without fleeing. She even learned how to make good grades. But she stayed to herself. She drew elaborate pictures of deer and daisies, stared out the window, and spent her recesses running through the field like a filly.

In some ways, Miracle integrated into Catholic school life better than Amelia ever did. She was happy because she learned how not to need anyone else there. Not the kids, not the teachers, and certainly not this skinny, dead man hanging from a torture device.

And every day, I was there. I waited at the top of the driveway, and I ran alongside the car. When Miracle got out, I covered her in kisses as my paws dirtied her skirt. And then, we’d run through the woods until dinner. We were happy.

I wish the story ended here. But if it did, I never would have been sent to her in the first place.

This is where Miracle’s life walks into the pain.

There was an accident at the logging company. You predicted that, too, didn’t you? A tree, a grand oak that had fathered thousands of acorns and sheltered hundreds of creatures, fell the wrong way. No one knew how. And no, despite my connections, I cannot say why some pain happens. It’s just part of life.

Amelia lost her husband and father. Miracle lost her father and grandfather.

At the funeral, the teachers and neighbors expressed their opinions. The deaths were judgment. While Larry was from a good Catholic family, he had fallen too far. Amelia was a decent girl, but her parents hadn’t been seen in church for years, not even on Easter. Were they even baptised? And what about that daughter, “Miracle”? At this rate, she’d end up just like her grandparents.

Maybe it was time Amelia got Miracle under control, before it was too late.

Within a month of the funeral, Katherine succumbed to her grief. Her body continued to breathe, but all joy and life ceased to exist in her.

It was the last straw for Amelia. She had to do something to fix her family. And she stared at me. Me, the mutt that represented everything she despised in her daughter. I was an old dog, but I still had a lot of life left to give to my girl.

That night, Amelia decided to cut my giving short.

I won’t be specific. She asked a teenage neighbor boy to do it. Miracle wasn’t told details, either, but she sensed them. And she hated her mother for it.

So Miracle came up with a plan. She was older now, too–ten. And she knew those woods, and they knew her.

At school the next week, she broke a window and fled. Once again, the gasping teachers couldn’t keep up with her. They called after her, but their voices were drowned out by a clap of thunder.

A sudden, wild spring storm swept through those woods. Miracle was not afraid.

And she was not surprised when she saw me, either. I was waiting for her in the flower meadow. Together, through the lightning and thunder and rain, we ran.

She knew where she was going because she was following instinct. And I knew where we were going because this had been part of her story since before she was born.

We found the mouth of the cave.

I turned to her and spoke in the language we had shared since the day of her birth. “This cave is the entrance to the Underworld.”

She shrugged. “I know.”

“If you enter, you will find your grandfather and father. And they will give you a choice.”

“I know.”

Together, we entered. We stumbled through darkness for hours. I heard the old gods, who spoke this story to me as we lived it. Maybe Miracle heard them, too. Maybe the words didn’t matter.

Time ceased in that darkness. Eventually, we found them, standing there.

They spoke in one voice. “(Grand)daughter, you may stay here with us and with your guardian. But if you do, you may never return to the land of the living.”

I looked at her, and she looked at me.

And when she gazed into my eyes, I showed her the life she would be forfeitting. It wasn’t a life without pain. None is. And her sadness and loneliness would threaten to consume her. But if she chose life, and she believed in herself with all her heart, she could break free of those feelings and find her own journey. Eventually, she could serve as a mother-guardian for other wild things, just like her.

I couldn’t answer for her. It was her choice. Heroes always make their own choices.

And this is one of those stories where you, reader, determine her ending. Did Miracle forfeit life, or did she choose it all over again?

Before you answer, consider this. In the years to come, my puppies were poised to find Miracle back. And their puppies find back her kids, and their puppies find back their kids.

And somehow, in a knowing that needed no words, Miracle knew.