Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 94716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 474(@200wpm)___ 379(@250wpm)___ 316(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 474(@200wpm)___ 379(@250wpm)___ 316(@300wpm)
Something about the man made the depths of my mind start to swirl. Memories that I hadn’t had in over seven years flashed through my head, but none stayed long enough to let me remember.
I just knew the instant that the old biker handed me the picture that this was going to be a turning point in my life.
I was scared shitless but something about the picture kept pushing me forward.
Towards him. Something huge. Something that was about to blow me away. Make me remember. Change my life.
***
Two days later
I was parked two blocks down from my favorite place ever.
Free was a motorcycle shop that resembled a secure military base. Although about five men, and tons of women, frequented the place, only one kept my attention.
I could see him, but not very well. I slid down low into the seat of my Chevy Cobalt; so low that I could barely see over the side of the passenger side window. To make matters worse, I pulled out my next-door neighbor’s Dora the Explorer binoculars and placed them up to my eyes. Lucky for me that the kid left them in my car. Apparently, it was a shitty gift for a ten year old. Who knew?
I spotted him instantly. Although these binoculars were the cheapest things I’d ever paid forty dollars for, they worked exactly how I wanted them to at that moment.
That exceedingly beautiful man. He was magnificent. He was all sinew grace, and long limbs. His fist had to be the size of half my face. A large, well-defined chest, and probably a six pack on top of that, if the ripples at the front of his shirt were anything to go by. His arms were quite large. So large that they probably were the size of one of my legs. Well, maybe not that big, but still.
Today, he was wearing black jeans that fit him to perfection. A dark grey sweatshirt pulled up to his elbows, and black motorcycle boots. A red bandana covered his hair, but what hair I could see was black and silky.
I’d been torturing myself for two full days trying to figure out who he was, but I just couldn’t get my brain to work right. I knew something drew me to him, but I didn’t know what. Something so strong and magnetic emanated from him that I just knew he was someone special to me.
When I had my accident just before my first semester of college, there was nobody. I was alone in a small town in the Texas Panhandle. No one knew who I was, only that I’d been found on the side of Route 66, seconds away from death. A sheriff’s deputy had stopped to move what he thought was a dead animal off the side of the road. Motorists had complained of buzzards flying low at the one sixty-one mile marker. What he’d found was anything but a dead animal.
I was airlifted from the right shoulder of Route 66. According to the town, they stopped traffic in both directions and loaded me in to the helicopter, then took off as if our tail was on fire. Apparently, I was coding at that moment in time, and it was a struggle to keep me alive long enough for the two hour trip to the closest trauma center. They’d bypassed the local hospital due to the extensive damage to my face.
It took months and months of reconstructive surgery, but, finally, they were able to repair most of the damage to the fractured bones. The plastic surgeon who worked on me made sure that everything was as close to perfect as it could be. Yet, that didn’t bring back the memory that I’d prayed for every night for the last seven years.
I’d made the time to thank the cop who found me, as well as the Medevac pilots. Their heroism was what inspired me to be a paramedic. I’d stayed in Shamrock for seven years. Throughout all that time, I’d never found out one thing about myself. I’d poured through every single newspaper within five hundred miles of where I was dumped, but I came up completely empty.
Either the family I had in my previous life didn’t want me back, or I was further from home than my instincts told me I was. The one piece of information I did have was a tattoo that spanned my left side. It was the one place on my body that wasn’t messed up in my accident.
The tattoo, itself, spanned from my armpit to my hip. It was a dream catcher that was covered in frost. Pieces of the winter snow froze it in its place, forming icicles in certain places. It was frozen in motion, almost as if a swift winter storm permanently altered the dream catcher’s structure. Underneath the dream catcher, there were initials. J and W. The initials intertwined with the dream catcher’s frozen feathers.
My doctor’s had used the initials on my hip for my made up name. No one knew what it was, so they called me Jane Wind. Where they came up with Wind, I don’t know. Maybe they just went by the Native American tattoo I was sporting, but I went with it because I didn’t have any better ideas. Despite the fact that it never felt right.
It was about six months ago that I started to dream. At first, they were nothing more than snippets, but they turned into full on dreams. It was as if I was watching a movie starring myself. However, when I woke up, they’d disappear as if I’d never even watched them.
The only thing I ever remembered was a man, a dream catcher, and what I thought to be a motorcycle, but could never be sure.
A slap on the hood of my car startled me so bad that I threw the binoculars at the window and screamed like a banshee. The disturbingly large figure in black fatigue pants and a black polo that read KPD yanked my door open and hauled me out of my car with unparalleled strength.