SHADOWLANDS

Sometimes, you don’t want to tell a story. Old, faded memories, limned with nostalgic glow and that sense of familiarity we all take for granted nowadays. There are four. We know them, now, by name. As we know those other few, the Ringos and the Jimis and the Kurts and the J. Rottens, we know Amy and Casey and Jason and Jesse, but how do we divulge the story without either impinging upon privacy (for they are private) or intruding on legend (for they have legacy)? I suppose the primer we all know will suffice: Casey, freshly commissioned into clergy, had a change of spirit. He left the cloister in the year 1648, and, for years, wandered the European countryside, gaining and losing money, gaining and losing love, gaining and losing wisdom. At a crossroads, he took a boat laden with freight, oxen and wheat, bound to a newly-discovered America. Jason, living a hard life in the early eighties playing for seminal new wave band The Go Gos, decided to take a break, moving to the Doomtown that a prescient Greg Sage (his third cousin) described. Jesse, born deaf-mute and blind, never left his house. Cared for by his mother, Diane, and a young Richard Branson, later head of Virgin Intergalactic. Egged on by Branson, he was encouraged to try music as a career. He replied "aaaeeeooooooorrrrgggghhh" after this request was touch-signed to him. This was the sign Branson needed. Amy coalesced into being in the early hours of the invasion of Normandy. Some unholy combination of primordial seawater stained with earnest blood caused her to awaken. Up from the recesses she swam, drinking in the epigenetic memory of hundreds of soldiers from the crimson-swathed sea. Upward. Shaken into consciousness by the thudding cacophony of mortar shells, newborn but ageless, beautiful and terrible, she breached surface. They thought it was an explosion at first: a blinding light, a great geyser of seafoam and blood. The sea parted, for a moment, where before a great troopship floated, its still-living inhabitants gibbering in ecstatic terror as they skidded breakneck across the shore. The seabirds, her harbingers, heralded her arrival. "SEE, SEE", they caw'd. A hundred eyes, silent, turned. Soft Kittens