Third Place Winner, Prose

The Call
by
Lily Iona MacKenzie
Richmond, California

When I was eleven, I skipped school for a month. Every morning I left our house as usual, but ducked into the garage before I reached the alley. After easing the door shut, I climbed on top of the workbench that ran along one wall. Then I raised myself onto plywood boards crisscrossing the rafters that created another level.

The light was dim. The place smelled of dust and grease.

I sprawled out, drifting and dreaming in a cocoon of cigarette smoke, watching dust particles spin like tiny planets in the sunlight shining through the two grimy windows.

Periodically, mother pattered down the concrete walkway and entered the garage, looking for a hoe or rake. Or my uncle Jack, a carpenter, shuffled inside, looking for his tools. Through cracks in the plywood I watched them, amazed they never noticed the smoky haze that hung near the ceiling.

Next to me were stacks of comic books and several Nancy Drew mysteries, my lunch, a lumpy pillow, and a ragged Hudson's Bay blanket. The hours flew, my inner world stimulated by what I was reading.

I joined Wonder Woman and her amazing Amazons, breaking the bounds of ordinary life as she broke the laws of nature. She shattered everything I was being taught in school about rationality, cause and effect, and the laws of gravity.
Not only did she live in the everyday world as I did, but she could explode out of it. She carried her power within her.

Batman, Robin, and Superman also were models of the life I admired.

Beneath the ordinary lived the extraordinary. All it took to access this level was a change of costume and magic words.

Though Nancy Drew didn't use arcane powers to aid her, she was smart and tracked any clues she uncovered. They always led to a secret or a valuable treasure. She doggedly followed her intuitions and didn't allow obstacles to deter her, even if her life was endangered.

That common white stucco garage became a temple where I lived with fantasy figures that had purpose and a thirst for adventure. They followed a quest, no matter where it led them.

While the truancy was a rebellious act against authority and a call for attention, a desire to see if I'd even be missed, it also was self-protective. I was nurturing the imagination. Since I didn't find a place for it in school, I had to follow a deeper urge so it could find wings.

In that month of truancy, I gave birth to something I had no language to articulate. Though I didn't understand until I was much older what I had discovered in that retreat (a strong sense of my feminine power and the transformational quality of the imagination), those thirty days, my wilderness experience (as long as it takes for a bird to lay eggs and hatch her young), were essential. Like my heroes and heroines, I had heard the call and followed it.

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