1-9-96- FROM THE BITUMINOUS DESERT, in headlong flight with sheets of fog spread in frightful bands across the midnight sky, I fled with a combination of repose and glee. The silent wind roared in my consciousness as I walked across ghostly hillocks, toward the splayed-open horizon. Like a laser beam catching motes of dust, the airport's oscillating beacon led me. I followed this guest star long into the night, as the much tinier heavenly stars grew more wet and scything, as my back grew tense with the repetition of travel, and hunger conjured ripe, plump images to laze around the opulent room behind my eyes. By the time the howling moon rose like a majestic coyote above, the giddy laughter of flight had chafed into grim silence, and I had time to ponder why I had left home. Surely it was not for fame nor treasure--these were mine by birthright, and abandoning the silky tents and caresses of home meant throwing it all away. But it seemed to me, as I paused once to take a tiny taste of precious water from my hip flask, that one could not throw off the mantel of a noble title quite so easily. I laughed almost aloud, dispelling the dank air minutely with a churn of fog of my own breath, to think of what I would say when I met another traveller: "I left because it was too easy." I could almost see the withered, mute pain behind my future roadmate's eyes, and I knew I had better remain silent than undermine my search for meaning with such a cushiony manifesto. My father had often spoken of the lot of most of the people who walk this land. I was taught to be philosophical, but not too much so--to ask why I was born into such fortune, but not to press the matter. The constellation of the wolf was now clambering over the ragged mound that marked the end of my our kingdom. I had an hour at most before daylight and the horrible, revealing sun. I did not feign familiarity with the wolf; I would seek a confidant within . . . . That's what I told myself then--before I really knew what it was to be lonely. A time would come when people's faces--almost any person's face--would shine brighter on my wretched nights than a million stars, and all of them suns. WHEN I AM FIFTEEN, nothing extraordinary will happen. I will roll out of bed as I have for the last approximately fourteen years, and I will go downstairs and mom will have laid out breakfast as usual: darjeeling tea in the spider-coloured pot, sliced tomatos and British cucumbers, clumsy wheat toast with a frustratingly faint taste of cinnamon, and coarse, plump sausages. She will look down at me from the windy granite heights of her fifty or so years, as she has every day for the last fourteen, and say good morning in a voice bright enough to dull the yellow daisies on the wallpaper. I will throw a few stones in my teacup for flavor, lick the cinnamon of my toast, and nibble on the vegetables while I wait for the heater to warm my toes enough to put my shoes on. Mom will either watch the news or else prattle about the garden. . . . That's what i THOUGHT. Instead, today, my fifteenth birthday and the darkest day of my life, I came downstairs and where the stove had been was only a crater, black, the size of my parents' double bathtub. There was my dad, kneeling over the smoking hole, saying, "It must have just exploded under the weight of all that sausage." There was no wonder in his voice, only a ragged, spent wind which issued forth as from a dank cavern deep in the folds of a blackened planet. Then, when I drew closer and looked at him again, I noticed he was not actually kneeling at all. He had suddenly--or perhaps gradually, overnight, who could say--turned into a boy of five or six years old. I sighed. Is would have to take over his dull job at the bank. I would have to learn to drive his locomotive-sized car, and fast--and a year early! I was not going to have any breakfast, nor hear the day's news of the flowers, and my feet were cold. I glanced bitterly at the smoke-killed daisies on the wall as I trundled towards the garage. "I'll be back by around five," I told my father, trying to remember how to get to the bank building where he was employed. I had a tremendous headache (and knew nothing of coffee) but I said grimly to myself as the car lurched into gear, "I'm fifteen now. I'll just have to learn to handle it."