Chapter One: Temenos

Amelia Ann reached inside the oak paneled return in the corner of her father’s board room and found the green plastic dump truck.  She knew its exact location.  She lifted it out, closed her eyes and heard her own small voice, “I request passage across this bridge.” Then, she said her father’s line, silently. “There will be a carrying charge for that.”

With a face as serious as the one she’d had when she was five, she responded silently, “how much?”

Her father looked up from his deliberations, across the room at her.  She almost believed he could hear their long ago repartee as well as she could.  But now, he seemed capable only of mild disgust; she was merely an adolescent to him.

A decade earlier, her father had purchased the green truck on his first day in his new position with Amelia Ann in mind. He’d tucked it into the return, anticipating their need for some relief from the long nights he knew they’d both have to spend in the office while he got up to speed.

It was tissue Amelia Ann first carried across the bridge of the long conference table. And it was quarters, a roll a month, with which her father supplied her to pay the carrying charges.

In due time, however, she found a different purpose for the green truck. As meetings wore on and promises of limits to her father’s preoccupation with his strange new career faded, the truck became a carrier to her temenos—a term her grandmother had taught her during an afternoon she still wished had never come to an end. “Temenos” Nana Mae had said like a strict school marm, but with a telltale twinkle at the edges of her eyes, “a holy place with a protected center. Carl Jung.”

Neither of them understood what that definition had unleashed in Amelia Ann’s psyche or in the world she unwittingly already inhabited.

“Edward, I want to see the pilot school opened in August. No exceptions, you understand?” “Yes,” Amelia Ann heard her father say with no discernable emotion to Norman Perkins, who owned half the city and now, apparently, also her father.

She grasped the green truck, closed her eyes, and prayed…at least she thought it might be considered prayer. It was the one word she uttered over and over as her sole plea to whatever divine presence might exist…though she seriously doubted it. Temenos, she whispered, with her eyes shut tight.

Without warning, she felt it, sun, burning her face, beating down on her exposed neck.  She opened her eyes to a squint. Her head rested on Nana Mae’s shoulder. The two of them sat under a blue sky on Nana Mae’s pontoon in the middle of lake Timor.