Free The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) by Frank P. Ryan Page B

concealed beneath his holy veneer? Perhaps he, or she, even knew who Mo really was, knew her real name, the name that had been given to her by her birth mother? It was something Mo had thought about a lot over the years. When parents gave the baby they loved a name, that was when the baby became somebody, a new andunique human being. Kate and Alan knew who they were. They had their names, given to them by parents who brought them into the world and loved them. She knew instinctively, like a self-evident truth, that Maureen was not her real name. It was the name given to her by Bethal and Grimstone, people who did not love her.
    Who am I?
Mo whispered to the world.
    A sudden, overwhelming feeling clutched at her heart as she tried to imagine what it must be like for a mother to bear a child, a daughter, and then abandon it. How could a mother forsake her baby daughter?
    Am I truly an orphan?
    Could she imagine what such a mother would feel? She tried to, but it felt so awful she couldn’t bear the thought.
    Am I a witch spawn as Grimstone says I am? Is my mother dead, like Kate’s and Alan’s? Or is she alive and doesn’t care about me?
    She had long ago realized that there were advantages to being nobody. When you are nobody you can pass people by and they don’t notice you. Meanwhile you make up for it by noticing more about those who are somebodies.
    Mark had always been stronger than she was. Somehow, he had found the strength to fight back. Even his sarcastic humor—and his constant self-deprecatory jokes—was his way of fighting back against the hurt. She watched him now unrolling his earphones, getting ready for some solitary listening. Alan was flat on his back in the heather with his head pillowed by hisbackpack, chewing on a stalk. Kate was sitting next to him, hunched forward over her drawn-up knees, uncapping a bottle of water.
    Mo lifted her face to gaze heavenward at the wheeling swallows. From somewhere nearby came the humming of bees, maybe a hive. Far away, down the slope, a chalk-blue plume hung in the air, metamorphosing subtly, as if a cloud of butterflies had just taken to the wing. Mo heard a faint sound, a pleasant but unexpected sound. She turned so she was facing the valley of the Suir. She could even smell something now, an unfamiliar scent, not a flower scent but a muskier smell, like the smell of bread baking.
    Then she saw the blooming.
    It was as clear as an island of lambent green in the middle of a gray ocean, a gigantic circle of fecundity, vast in diameter, around a single focus. The very center was monumentally clear across the valley. And now, as she opened her mind to it, she sensed a new stirring, as if the very landscape had whispered something into the air, and that awesome message was spiraling and eddying toward her without any sense of wind.
    Was she imagining it?
    She waited patiently, all senses alert. She sensed it again. She laid herself bare to it this time, throwing open her entire body and mind. It was definitely coming in waves. She felt another wave touch her. It didn’t feel like a tangible physical sensation. She didn’t know how to describe what she was feeling, other than it was some kind of contact, being-to-being. She felt no premonition of harm. Without hesitation, she slipped offher sneakers and socks to feel the ground under her bare feet. She took the bog-oak figurine out of her hip pocket and palpated its familiar shape with the fingers of her right hand. She felt the smoothness of the body, the three knobs of heads, twirling them around and around. She brought it to her lips and kissed it.
    She began to sing.
    Tentatively, like a glimmer of moonlight, the presence reached out again, eddying like a wave through water, and found her. This time Mo gasped with the intensity of communication, the feeling of oneness.
    Turning, in a slow rapture of motion, she looked back at her friends, willing them to join her. But they were too preoccupied to notice. The