Behind the Wayside Cafe....by Becky Wheeler

Read the short story in full HERE!!!

This "short" story was written in 2012...

Rough Draft of The Other Side of the Sea, Chapter One

The Other Side of the Sea by Becky Wheeler

Chapter One (rough draft)

    Tristan once told me there was hidden power within the written word, before he went to fight in the war that divided our family. A war his letters stopped coming from and mine eventually stopped going to. I believed what he told me, that the power of my written word, my letters, would keep him safe. But now I know how foolish that thinking was. My letters did not protect him. And the letters I still have from him do nothing to relieve the pain nestled in my chest, close to my heart. The place once reserved for my living, breathing brother is now occupied by the cavernous, hollow reminder that he once existed in my life. His letters are useless to fill the void.

    I do not stop re-reading them.

    We never received a condolence letter from the British Army. I don't even know if they send them to Irish civilians. I haven't gotten up the nerve to ask. In my family, any line of questioning comes from the top down, not the other way around. My mother used to come up with reasons why Tristan's letters had stopped, but as the weeks dragged into months, the reasons became more and more ridiculous.

    "I'm sure they're on the move and haven't had a chance to sit and write," she used to tell me at the beginning of this slow slip into a new world we had all helplessly slid down into. I think her last comment was several months ago when the mail arrived and there was still no word.

    "They must be out of paper in the Army," she said vacantly. The absurdity of this statement made me want to giggle and laugh, but the desolation in my mother's fevered eyes drove any mirth out of myself and after that, his letters were never mentioned again.

    This weekend is my fourteenth birthday and my mother has somewhat drawn herself out of her depressive stupor to plan my party. I think it is good she has something else to focus on. She does seems to have a bit more energy these past few days. I hope it stays. Watching her listless form move about the grounds was beginning to be too much for me to watch. I was beginning to think she didn't even care that at least I was still around.

    The preparations for my party began weeks ago. Mother invited Lucy and Mary from Wicklow Town and every child of good standing within ten miles of us. She even invited cousin William and cousin Anne from Dublin. I'm not sure if they'll bring Gabriel, but I hope they do. He was terribly cute in his bassinet the last time they were up. Although I suppose he would be a year older now and most likely walking on his own. It will be good to see Anne. She and I started a new club in the hedge when she was here last year and I even managed to save our badges. Girls for Green. It is a gardening club for only the very special. Well, only for Anne and I actually.

    I am very excited about all the people my mother has invited, but I think I am the most excited about the pear tarts Cook is baking. The last of the season's pears have been saved and I can't wait. I don't know if it's my taste buds growing up and learning more about how to taste, but every year the tarts seem to taste better than the last. Cook even told me I could help her make them, and that means I'll get to lick the mixing bowl!

    All this week and the week before, the manor has been getting a cleaning and straightening it might not have seen since last holiday time. And I think the staff are quite excited about having guests again. The manor has always opened its doors to the finery of Dublin when they fancy a little craic in the countryside, yet with my mother's disposition, we haven't had guests in quite sometime.

    Conal has been letting me help in the gardens, as well. He is our gardener and has been the groundskeeper of these lands since before my father owned the manor. Cook jokes that he was born out in the patch of heather on the southside near the creek and has just never left. I'm not sure if I do believe her. Whenever I ask Conal about it, he just winks at me and smiles, then gets busy with whatever he was doing.

    I love helping in the gardens. Conal walks through them all with me making me identify each plant and each flower and their medicinal uses, if they have any. Today, however, I have a second intention of walking with Conal through the gardens. There is a secret place back in the woods surrounding the manor to the west that no one knows about except Conal. Well, and Tristan, but what does that matter. It is a small glade with a gentle waterfall at the east side I discovered a few years ago, across a small creek and south of the giant oak we used to luncheon beneath as a family when I was younger. I believe the glade drew me to it, and when I am there, anything that is bothering me or troubling me slips off my thoughts like butter sliding across a pan and melting away. It is my place, my sanctuary.

    When I was there yesterday, I noticed a flower I have never seen before and I'm hoping Conal can help me identify it.

    "Conal?" I ask after I answer his question about

    "Yes, lass," he replies.

    "I saw a flower yesterday in my glade that I've never seen before. Can you tell me what it is? It's purple with a yellow stamen and thin leaves that come to a point." We had stopped walking and he was looking down at me. I always imagined that if I ever got to have a Grandfather I actually spent time with, Conal would be it. My father's father was an insufferably busy man who I'm not certain has ever said more than three words to me in my entire life, although I've been told of his preference of me over all the grandchildren. He and Tristan stopped speaking when Tristan announced he wanted to go to the war and fight against the Germans and after Tristan left, I heard him tell someone he no longer had a grandson.

    "Hmmm," Conal scratched his chin. I think scratching his white whiskers made him think better because every time I would ask him a question about a certain type or variety of flower, it's what he would do before he answered. "I might have an idea, but why don't you go down with your sketchbook and bring me back one of your famous flower sketches for me to identify it from?"

    Whether he needed the sketch to identify it or he just wanted another one for his collection, I did not mind. It was a bright idea and I don't know why I hadn't thought of it first! "That's a great idea, Conal! I feel silly I didn't come up with it myself."

    "No need to worry, lass," he was smiling as me, with that familiar sparkle in his eye, "your brain kicks in at age 14."

    He was lucky he moved quick as he laughed at his joke, because I took my hat off my head and swung it in his direction, hard. "Well, you're lucky your agility hasn't worn off any, old man!" I said, laughing as I tried again to hit him with my hat and missed.

    I finally land one good whack with my hat on his arm and run up to my room to get my colored pencils and sketchbook. They are sitting on the windowsill that overlooks the circle drive. I glance down and see that my father's car is parked in front like it just returned from somewhere.

   I race down the back stairs and steal a slice of thick brown bread from the kitchen on my way to the back door. Cook spies me. She is a round woman whose cheeks are almost always pinned back in a smile. And even though she is older than my mother, has never had any children. She told me once when I was younger and asking about it that the Good Lord put her on this earth to make food, not children.

    "Sophia!" she yells.

    I stop. I don't run from her. It's a deal we made a long time ago. She stays fair with me about whyever it is I'm running or whatever it is I'm doing, and I don't run from her. She always wound up learning what I was doing every time anyway. So, I gave up.

    "Hello, Meg!" I say, jovially. Hopefully she doesn't keep me long.

    "Where you going in such a hurry?"

    "Just out for a quick hike." I am inching toward the back door. "Is there anything you needed?" I'm almost to the door frame.

    "Only to remind you that your dinner will be down here tonight, my dear."

    "Okay!" I say and dip out the back door before even thinking to ask her why.

    By the time I reach the forest at the edge of the grounds, I have finished my piece of bread and I slow to a walk through the familiar undergrowth of the forest. Its shady coolness embraces my skin and I wish I would have brought my sweater. There's no way I'm going back now, though. The smell of the damp earth brings a slight smile to my face. I always feel at home in the woods.

    Tristan and I would come and spend hours in this forest, leaving no inch undiscovered. We knew where our land was and he taught me all the monuments and markers that announced the edge of ours and the beginning of the O'Byrne's. He respected my glade and as I approach it tonight, the familiar sting of unwanted tears burns my eyes and heats my face. I drag my sleeve across my eyes and nose and shake my head. Not tonight. I have work to do.

    When I was younger, I used to believe that my glade was a faerie kingdom's court, with the flat rock on the North side where the King and Queen would sit and enjoy the show put on in the glade for their honor. I actually used to even put on shows, imagining the whole faerie court was my audience. I haven't performed in a long time. After Tristan's letters stopped, I tried coming here for comfort, but I found it even harder to be here. To be anywhere in the forest.

    I only recently began to come into the forest again. It is still hard sometimes, but the glade is my secret place, my sanctuary. And I am learning to love it again for what it means to me.

    My pencils clink in my pouch as I cover the remaining distance until the trees open up to reveal the magnificence of the clearing. The quiet rush of the water is instantly comforting and the sun streaming down into the open meadow lifts my heart.

    Then I hear something. I instantly recognize it as footfalls and I duck behind one large oak tree, trying to quiet my breathing the way Tristan taught me when there were deer around. The thought of a stranger stepping foot into my space suddenly drives a panic up inside me and I involuntarily jump out in front of a boy maybe a little older than I am and yell, "Stop!"

    I frighten him terribly and he stumbles backward, trips over a log and falls hard on his backside. Good.

    "What are you doing?!" I demand. My face is a furnace and my breath is hard and heavy. I jab my hands onto my hips like I see Cook do when she's mad at one of the housemaids and I scowl down at him with as much venom as I can muster. I don't even care what his answer may be. I want him gone!

    He just looks up at me confused and I wonder if he's going to cry. I almost feel bad for him, but not for long. His face twists to match mine. "What are you doing?! Are you crazy?"

    I do not recognize his accent, but I understand him enough to reply, "This is my land. You are trespassing! You better get out of here before my father gets here," I lie. I glare hard at him and hope he just goes.

    "Gladly!" he barks back. I watch him get to his feet and rub his backside where he landed. His clothes look well worn. His umber hair hangs partially in his face as he looks at me. "And tell your father he should teach his daughter better manners."

    The stick I throw at him bounces off the tree to his left as he is running back the way he came. I wish I would have hit him with it! What an awful boy! I pace back and forth in the glade, willing myself to calm down. How dare he intrude?! I hope I never see him again!

    I almost forgot what I came here for. The flower is right where it was yesterday, unchanged, but for some reason, I feel like there is something different about my glade. My sanctuary has been muddied, and I do not like it.

    I sketch the flower for Conal and walk home.


...If you like what you've read so far, please consider contributing to my research fundraising!  CLICK HERE or contact me at rdhdmoon@gmail dot com  Thank you for reading!

Sharing a Story

So, I have begun posting daily updates to my indiegogo campaign introducing my writing to those that are considering funding. I thought it best to show an example of my fiction writing rather than my poetry, so I naturally chose my favorite short story, Behind the Wayside Cafe. After the campaign is over, I will happily share the whole story, not broken up into 2,500 character bits, on this blog. Or at least a link to somewhere it can be read in its entirety. I wrote it a few years back, but I love Joanna just as much as the day I met her, standing on the side of that sweltering Arizona freeway. Check out the story (and contribute!) in its parceled bits at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/writing-the-other-side-of-the-sea under the "Updates" heading or just check it out in its totality here in a few weeks. Two weeks left to go on crowd funding! If you haven't donated yet, please do!! I want to make Sophia and Saul just as happy as I did Joanna. :) Thanks!!

Fundraising launched through indiegogo.........Donate Here!

Donations may be made here:

Click here to make a contribution

Click here to view the Campaign


I am excited and I gotta be honest, quite a bit nervous! This is my indiegogo campaign I launched on Thursday and I am still awaiting my second contributor. Asking people to help fund your dream is a humbling experience. Asking anyone for money can be. I used to travel all over the country, sitting outside of gas stations, on the sides of the road, out front grocery stores, and on any street stoop until the owner would come and chase us off, flying a cardboard sign or when there was no cardboard or no Sharpie, just verbally asking passersby for some spare change. Most would pass by. Some would toss something our way. One gave me a dollar and told me it was specifically intended for food. I put that dollar in a separate pocket so it wouldn't get mixed up with beer and cigarette money. I spent it on food, because that was her intention of donating. I didn't care my companions made fun of me. I suppose even though I didn't have a bed to go sleep in at night, I still had a sense of respect for those that were going to help me.

This story is recalled to me as I venture off on the biggest "spare change" of my life. Only this time, this request isn't for the pleasures of a travelling nomad, it is for the purposeful mission of a destined writer to complete a novel. And although the person making the requests may have changed some parts of her life between the two experiences, the sense of respect remains very intact and utterly unaltered. Those that will donate to me, I will treat with an honor and reverence that wells from deep within the core of me that is so entrenched, it still had its subtle influences with my actions even when I had wandered so far from its true purpose. The road is winding, sometimes nearer, sometimes further, but always on I traveled, and still do so.

I have now launched my biggest spare change. I am asking the universe to provide for me, as it did those many years without my knowledge. I lived with no plan, no back up plan, no plan B but only within the present moment, that place where somehow, everything I needed made its way to me, and to this day, still does.

Plot

Synopsis of The Other Side of the Sea

by becky wheeler

The year is 1943 and 14-year-old Sophia Barnett's life has felt nothing but alien to her the past eight months. Ever since she and her parents stopped receiving letters from Tristan, her brother who went to fight over in Europe for the Allies, nothing has seemed the same around their rural Irish estate. A dull haze has settled over everything and everyone, and just as it seems to be lifting for the celebration of Sophia's fourteenth birthday, another surprise rocks her world. A strange boy and his mother are here to stay with Sophia's family. Secrets seem to swirl around the boy and Sophia makes it her mission to find out about him. She feels angered and confused when she is told nothing except that these two strangers will be staying with the family until further notice.
Sophia's luxurious home is on an estate with a gorgeous garden, and surrounded by sprawling woods. She long ago discovered a sacred place in the woods which she calls her sanctuary, and when the new boy, Saul, trespasses upon her sacred realm, Sophia decides it is her personal mission to make him uncomfortable with his new accommodations.
What Sophia eventually discovers about this unwelcome visitor tears her world in two. The boy and his mother, a dear friend of Sophia's mother, are Jewish refugees smuggled into Ireland to stay with Sophia's family.  After she learns the truth about Saul, a camaraderie develops. Over the months their friendship deepens, along with Sophia's understanding of the war. Keeping the secret behind their identities is of grave significance. If Sophia's Grandfather, a passionate IRA member, finds out his own son and daughter-in-law are helping the Ally regime, they will all be made to suffer. Now Sophia, always her Grandfather's favorite, is faced with a decision where she does not like either outcome. How does she decide where her loyalties lie? Could she ever live with herself for sending these two friends back to the horror that barely let them out alive? But can she continually keep lying to her Grandfather?
            Together Sophia and Saul's memorable adventures bring insightful impressions of life and the purpose and inclinations of others and themselves. Will their experiences provide them enough intuition to make the difficult choices they must make?

This is only the basic, rough-draft main storyline. There are many secondary characters and side stories that accompany these multidimensional people along their lives.

This story is told from younger perspectives by very bright and captivating characters, and addresses the constant balance of figuring out what is expected of you and what you grow to expect of yourself to be able to live with yourself. Some decisions are quick and easy, others are agonizing with the weight of their possible outcomes. Secrets kept, truths betrayed, honoring your family before yourself or your morals before family, these themes are a major component of this novel and will be compassionately, yet realistically portrayed within every character's growth over the arc of the story line.

The story will fill out and gain running legs during my research venture and I am so excited to be at this point in my ability and my motivation. This book is a mission I feel to put out to the world. I offer my many thanks for your time in reading this and for your positive thoughts as I continue along this journey!

Why I write

A world I can escape to. My mind, the one place no one can ever get to me, if I don’t want them to.  The world of fiction, only existent in my own head, my own imagination. That world has always been a constant comfort to me, someplace that would never go away, until I drove it away with drugs and alcohol.  How thankful I am it waited for me to come back.

A world I can escape to, the world of a book.  A place I am in complete control, yet powerless to make the choices, the place where my stories come from.  These characters I have been carrying along with me for years and decades, or maybe just an hour, before they are pressing at my soul to come out, to be set free.  They come to me because I am the one who has the words to tell their story, and I am the one who knows the arrangement, the orchestration of their lives. I am the conductor of the symphony that is their world.  I never know the whole concerto before I begin to write, and it drifts to me slowly, tickling the corners of my knowledge until I can bring it into focus.  Bits and pieces fall into place, like notes or a couple bars of a tune that you know would be beautiful if you could only remember the whole song.  It is I who must remember for them.  For it is I who knew the tune all along.  I am a musician of words, a melodic seamstress of sentences, plucking the strings of language to elicit the strains of a song whose verse was written long ago. It is I who must remember how to play.  For I owe it to this world I found refuge in, to replenish its landscape of imagination. To bear homage to the dependable pages of the book to always catch me no matter how far a fall I was plummeting through, and to take me to the place I could be safe. Within its comforting covers, I slept cradled in the bed made by someone who, like me, spun webs of worlds to catch and devour anothers loneliness, despair, boredom or curiosity.  I owe it to those who live for those worlds, and for the worlds not yet dreamt up, but most of all, I owe it to those worlds not yet dreamt. I write.

The Beginning

This blog was created to track the journey of my novel, The Other Side of the Sea, from where it is currently in production, to where it will one day be available on bookstore shelves.

Aptly titled, this post is the beginning of my blog tracking this journey. I hope to keep in touch with people through this process and share my joys, as well as learn to share my sorrows. Much more of the former will be popping up than the latter, I am sure.

The journey of this historical fiction novel began four years ago with a short story about a girl and a boy I did not know much about. Over the next few years, little insights would randomly dawn on me about these characters, along with additional characters within their world. As I grew to know more and more about them, I finally realized I did not have a short story with some characters that were going to fade away after I wrote about them. I had something much bigger. Their story kept unveiling itself to me and continues to do so. Sometimes beautiful, other times hideous. But all very intensely felt. I have the entire outline mapped out now and have been writing since the beginning of 2014 with a renewed purpose and intensity.

In August, I am going overseas to Ireland to research the setting and people within the setting of my novel. I have many places mapped out to visit, and I have many questions ready to discuss with the local population when I am settled. I intend to keep those interested in my progress up to speed through this blog.

I thank you for reading and I will soon post a synopsis of the novel, along with character descriptions for my three main characters. I will also be sporadically posting excerpts from the novel, if people seem to be interested in reading small samples.

I am unimaginably excited for where this journey will carry me, and for all the remarkable knowledge and experiences that will go along with it!

Thank you for coming with me!
Much love,
b