[twwm] illuse prompt 2 - christen

Sandy was quiet for a long time when she first got the phone call. Winter had come and passed, and nothing from her father. The police told her they had called to ask if she wanted to file a missing person's report. They had found his car sitting in the middle of the desert, abandoned like so many tumbleweeds. A painting sat on the trunk, forgotten, buried under the last sandstorm's dust.

She put the phone down, away from her ear, and walked into the living room. Some part of her knew he would never come back. But to abandon her like this? To leave without a trace? What had she done wrong - what had she not done for him? Her eyes closed, and she collapsed to the floor, silent sobs wracking her body once again.

Meanwhile, in the desert she now called home, the former man had been lost. He felt his mind become fuzzy....and that was the last thing. Besides seeing a great spirit towering above her, there was nothing else. She looked back to the car, sitting forlornly, engine still running. It sputtered and died under her gaze, headlights blinking once, twice, before closing forever.

It was like a shutter on her life had dropped down, encapsulating her in this strange, unfamiliar world. The large creature, smoke dripping from her back, stared down. "I am Majanthi." Her voice was deep, low, feminine. It calls to mind the wind whistling through empty desert canyons at night, howling and moaning low against the rocky walls.

"Who am I?" the former man was confused. This body was not her own, but it was. It belonged, and yet it didn't. "How did this happen?"

The creat - Majanthi, she reminded herself - shifted above. Her movements, albeit slow and without much emphasis, seemed to communicate a sigh. Weary as she was wanting to once again plod along the trails, she answered this new little one's questions. "You will find....your name in time..." her speech had slowed to a drawl, a slowing crawling of words like ants over picked clean bones. "I have given you the gift of a second life...you were lost and...confused. You searched for meaning in your..." she trails away again, looking towards the moon like it pulls her somewhere else.

The former man, not quite herself, but someone new now, nods. "I was lost. I came here to find something that wouldn't stop calling me. But that didn't mean I wanted to be changed! I have a daughter, I have a life, I have a house!" If she had teeth, she'd be baring them at the creator of this new, smaller body. "You've used me. Made a grave mistake, an ill choice."

Majanthi lowered her head back down to the little one. "Have I?" She tilted her great head, shaggy mane falling over both her eyes, only a sliver of white peeking through. It haunted the former man, ghostly, pale dead fish eye showing through the stringy mats of crystal-covered hair, decorated with trinkets. "Or have I given you a new chance?" Smoke dribbles and billows around her form, and she begins to walk away into the desert sands, cresting a hillock of a faraway dune and disappearing into the horizon line of the night sky.

She now stands alone, former painter, former artist, former father. Thinking about her new body - the long, sloping curve of her neck, crowned head of succulent leaves like the one she used to keep in the kitchen. Piebald mottled her light-colored fur now, and a bed of brightly colored flowers, with fragrant leaves sat on her back. She was no longer...a man. Like the dual-parent she had had to become for Sandy, she now was, in reality, that dual-parent.

She sits down, recalling the conversation with the great creature Majanthi, the creator of this new life she is now forced to live. How she had been used...with such ill intent. With such careless thought she now had to care for others. She was...Illuse. A small desert rat scurried up next to her, attracted to the smoke that rose out of a small potpourri pouch strung around her neck. It tilted its head, curiously, as though it could not quite see her.

She sensed the little thing needed help, required assistance, and with a long-suffering sigh, followed it as it hopped along, leading her to its collapsed den. With a simple swipe, a movement of her newfound paw, Illuse freed the young of this mother that had come to her for help, and went on her way. The sands shifted under her movements as she followed another unknown path, wondering about the child she had left behind.

In the lonely house on the tall hill, up the gravel driveway, and into the home itself, Sandy was talking to police. They had found nothing abnormal in the house, in the car, or in the painting. At first, they had been suspicious of the figure, hazy smudge against the horizon line. Sandy pulled out a stack of the canvases in the corner, each one accompanied by a similar figure.

The case was dropped after only a few months, Sandy left alone to cope with her grief over losing one parent that was really both.

Illuse looked out to the sunset from the top of a large red rock pillar - swearing to come home again.