A Sad Day, 7,578 Words

An intense writing day today. I've now started the second of the ten myths. I knew where I wanted to start with this myth, with Reggie's relationship with her brother, but no idea where it is going to end up. Probably something about her relationship with her father, I guess. Here is an excerpt describing an event from when Reggie was 3. Jack Connelly would have been about 17 here. My friend Sarah will recognize the description of Reggie's dream from an e-mail I sent her a long time ago, describing a dream I had.

“What did you say?” She asked through clenched teeth. Jack stood quickly, coming to Reggie’s side and looking at Patricia warily.
“She’s just playing, Patricia,” he said quietly, his hands held out in a calming gesture.
“I was talking to Regina, not you,” she said icily. Reggie was afraid. She had never heard her mother talk to Jack that way before. She didn’t know what she had done wrong. Her eyes filled with tears and her lip began to tremble. Jack tried to steer her away, but Patricia put her hand on his arm. He dropped it to his side.
“Go on Reggie, tell your mommy what you said, and then we’ll go to my house to play some more, okay?” he smiled at her, but Reggie thought he looked scared, too. The tears in her eyes spilled over, and she began to cry. But she would try to be brave. For Jack.
“I always find him?” she spoke, so quiet it was almost a whisper. She was looking down, her tears spilling onto the front of her red and white checked sundress.
“Find who?” her mother asked, her quiet tone seemed gentle, but it was full of venom.
Reggie looked up then, into her mother’s beautiful face, which had turned ugly with rage. “Brandon,” she whispered softly, her breath catching as she spoke. Neither of them saw it coming. Jack was as astonished as she was when her mother lashed out and slapped her with such force that she was knocked to the ground. Jack stepped in between them, scooped her up, and ran with her in his arms to the safety of his house next door. That day he wiped the blood from her nose and dried the tears on her face, kissing them away, soothing her with his gentle voice, with his warm, safe embrace. She never mentioned her brother or her dreams again.
But she kept a journal, because she cherished her memories of her nocturnal life with her brother. She was on her 7th journal now, each one worn with multiple readings. Many of the entries were tear stained. The morning of her father’s wake, she awoke and wrote an entry:
I had a dream last night that you and I walked across the border into India. I made the security guard smile and it made his face look completely different- beautiful. It was very, very late at night, but we weren't tired and decided that we would walk all night and talk about the universe, because, as I said in my dream "what else are you going to do in India?" You agreed and we walked on a worn walking path through a field of high grass. It was very dark, with only the moonlight to give us any light, and we really had no idea where we were or where we were going but just kept walking. There was a breeze that blew the tall grass around and lifted our hair. Then we heard a vehicle coming, I was going to ask for a ride, but then you warned me it was probably soldiers and we decided to hide in the tall grass. We lay down side by side as the jeep full of soldiers passed by and we held hands because we were afraid. Then we fell asleep, and I woke up. It made me miss you a lot, because who else would walk with me all night through the moonlight?”
She had tears on her face when she awoke, but they dried as she wrote, leaving behind shadows, ghosts of tears; nearly invisible traces of evidence that an emotion had been felt here, once.