A Girl of the Paper Sky by Randy Mixter Read Free Book Online Page A

seemed to be on me and I knew I was close - this close - to a complete nervous breakdown. Another voice in my head, another visit to a strange world, and I would have tipped over the edge.
    He saved me then with the smallest of gestures. He winked at me. He was in on the joke. He winked at me and the two of us became one. It wouldn’t be for long, not then, but it was long enough to set my head straight. His wink, the blinking of his eye, rescued me.
    The colors above him faded as he walked toward me. “Are you okay?” He asked.
    “Yes, I think so,” I replied.
    “I never met your mother,” he said. “I wish I had.”
    “I’ll take you to her,” I said, and we turned together.

    The viewing hours had ended and most of those paying their respects had left. I sat on a chair close to my mother; Barb on my right, Shirley on my left. We talked of school and all the upcoming activities in the year ahead, the prom and graduation, and they both comforted me as they spoke, thinking I was brittle and might break at any time.
    Truthfully, I had never felt stronger, because I sensed that my questions would soon be answered. I was wrong. Three years would pass before I revisited the paper sky, three long years of not knowing the meaning of the place and my connection to it. It was long enough to think I may have imagined the entire thing. A door, once open just wide enough for me to slip through, had slammed shut. When it opened again I was twenty-one years old and married and scarcely prepared for the journey ahead.
    DREAMLAND

18
    Not long after my mother became part of the earth, or part of the sky, I’m not sure which, Brian and I began a relationship. It started with weekend dates and progressed throughout the school year to nights in my bedroom - study times , I informed Aunt Betsy, but she certainly knew better.
    I’d be lying if I told you Brian was anything but a perfect gentleman, perhaps too perfect for my taste, but he did become an excellent card player with the hand I dealt him. He knew when to call and when to fold.
    By the night of my senior prom, we might as well have been an old married couple. By then, I knew him as well as I knew myself. We talked of marriage often, but he insisted on waiting until we were more settled in our lives.
    I started college, nothing fancy, just the community college outside of Columbus. Brian though needed to scratch the itch of the Mayfield men. He enlisted in the army.
    Believe me, I gave him hell about it. Although we were still in the officially dating stage, I felt I knew him well enough to speak my mind. In my opinion it took a lot of nerve to leave a girlfriend in a still blossoming relationship to march off to a dangerous war on the other side of the world. It just wasn’t right, and I told him so in no uncertain terms.
    He got around it by asking me to marry him, producing the engagement ring on the spot while he knelt in front of me on bended knee. Of course, I said yes, and Brian went away forty days later to begin his three-year enlistment.
    There were tears when he left, and I think that deep down inside of him he felt a twinge of guilt for leaving me. I didn’t need to remind him of my parents, he knew, but the Mayfield men legacy was too strong for him to fight, and I paid the price.
    He promised a wedding when he returned, not from boot camp, but from Vietnam. He was so sure of himself, so sure he would return to me.
    We wrote to each other every day. I never missed one and I can’t recall him skipping a day either. He had been gone for nearly six months when I started to have the dreams; not of the paper sky, but of Brian in Vietnam, in the fields, on patrol.
    I was always in the same spot, at the crest of a hill as the sun set behind me. It reminded me of the hill in the paper sky except instead of a town below me I looked down on a large expanse of tall thick grass leading into a jungle. In my dreams, I watched a small group of soldiers cross the field,