The Legend of Kaya

Ashley Marie Spencer

Copyright

The Legend of Kaya. Copyright 2016 by Ashley Marie Spencer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form whatsoever (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise)  without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations.  For more information address Ashley Marie Spencer, 901 N. Splinter Road, North Platte, NE 69101.

Originally published by Dot’s Micro-Publishing House, www.dotsmicropublishinghouse.com. All rights returned to Author.

eISBN: 978-1-7321-7113-8

Printed in the United States.

2nd edition

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Author Information

Prologue

"You’ve got to be kidding me. The fate of the future is relying on a camera that looks like it’s from 1992 and uses tapes? There wasn’t one digital camera that could be salvaged?"

I grimaced at the sturdy, bulky, black camera that was stationed on top of the tripod. It reminded me of the camera my parents used to use to film all of my birthdays and Christmases when I was a kid. Of the few things that survived the now crumbling, dilapidated houses, this hunk of junk was one of them.

Close. It says 1993 on the battery cover. Don’t worry, I’m sure someday someone will scavenge a VCR/DVD converter. And then after that it’s just a matter of getting internet up and running again.

Since when are you the optimist? I asked Kiyahe from my perch on the stiff wooden stool in front of the camera.

One of us needs to be. And besides, the worst is over, Kiyahe’s voice lowered and his words slowed. Like talking about our survival was still surreal to him. I couldn’t say I blamed him. I was still having a hard time understanding it all myself. We made it through the hardest things imaginable and now all that’s left to do is tie up loose ends.

And what happens after the ends are tied?

Kiyahe didn’t answer right away, but that was typical. The wise Native in him required that he take hard questions and chew them over until he had the best answers. To the people it was admirable. To me it was annoying.

After the ends are tied… we start over. It’s a new world now.

Life goes back to normal? I asked dubiously.

"Life will never be normal, Kiyahe scoffed. And then his voice lowered again so that I could barely understand the words he whispered under his breath. Not for any of us who survived anyways."

We both stayed silent for a while after that while he adjusted the tripod. I knew he was right, nothing would ever be the same. We would have to determine what would be the new normal. Actually I would have to determine what would be the new normal. There was no job in the world, not this world or the old one, that was as hard as this. But I had embraced it nonetheless. I had a job to finish.

And a new life to begin.

Just talk to the camera like you’re talking to the people. Make it conversational and real, he coached from behind the camera. Easy for him to say. He didn’t have to sit here and recount all the unfathomable things we went through that brought us here. No, unfortunately that job was mine and even more unfortunately, I sucked at it.

I took a deep breath in preparation to explain the unexplainable to the camera. To the people and all the generations that would watch this after them. Long after the tragedies of today were nothing but a distant memory. Long after I was gone. I couldn’t let them forget. I couldn’t let the part of history that I had narrowly survived repeat itself. I had to protect the people. My people. To teach them. To sustain them. To secure them.

This was our second chance.

And I knew it was the last one we would get.

Behold this day. It is yours to make.

-Black Elk, Oglala Lakota.

Chapter One

Mom! I’m running down to the store to pick up my paycheck. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I darted down the stairs taking them three at a time. I was being courteous by letting her know where I was going but that didn’t mean I wanted her to catch me and send me on an errand run for her. It was almost a hundred degrees outside, and I preferred not to bake in my car that had a barely working A/C.

But before I could make my quick escape, my mother came around the corner of the entrance to the kitchen, wringing her hands with a tattered towel. Damn. I only had one tennis shoe on. I needed to start yelling out my whereabouts after I had my shoes on and was on my way out the door. I let out a sigh and waited for the request for me to pick up two or three grocery items while I was out.

Oh, Marie, could you pick up a gallon of milk and some dish soap while you’re down there?

Shocker.

You know when I go off to Kodiak next month, you’re going to need a new errand girl, I said. Kodiak was a four-year school two hours away from where we lived. I couldn’t wait to get there. No more chores, no more errands, no more high school. Just the thought of my freedom on the edge of the horizon, three more weeks away, nearly erased my irritation with the errand request.

Well until then, I’m going to enjoy your services, she smirked. I kept my mouth shut as she went back to the kitchen. Arguments with my mom were always losing battles, and I was trying to keep the peace since I would be moving out soon. Three more weeks. Three more weeks. A break from home life, a chance to start over.

I yanked the front door open and was nearly blinded by the bright sunlight glaring down at me. My irritation resumed-it was hot as hell out here. I could see nothing but the light dancing off the glass in the front door for several moments. When I had finally blinked my vision clear, I squinted into the blinding sunlight.

The minute I shut the door behind me I inhaled a big breath of stagnant, Atlantis, South Dakota air. The instant the air hit my throat and nose, they dried up and set to itching. The air was the kind of hot that when you breathed it, you swore there was no oxygen in it. For a small town that was named after an ocean-sunken city, it had to be one of the driest places in all of the Midwest. Especially this year. We had passed the drought record by a long shot and there was no sign of the dry heat letting up anytime soon. It was early August, and we hadn’t seen a drop of rain all summer. We’d probably be baking like this until October. At least.

Everywhere you went in town for the last two months, you ran into angry, twice-baked people. The farmers were in a permanent bickering mood because of the dried up crops and livestock. They sniveled and snarled their way through town and if anyone was unlucky enough to get in their way, they got to hear all about the relentless heat. As if the farmers were the only ones experiencing it. And the farmer’s wives were just as snarky, no doubt from listening to their husband’s surly complaints and from having to smell their husband’s rancid B.O. when they came in from the fields in the evenings. Anyone who had a job where they worked outside or anyone who futilely tried to maintain a nice lawn had the same aura of tension following them, accompanied by skin the color and texture of leather. Even the neighborhood kids seemed wilted by the unceasing heat, having no energy to go out and play. Their parents didn’t even have the energy or the heart to force them off the video games in their cool houses. A drought this time of year left the overcrowded public pool, indoor air conditioners, and the evening air as the only sources of refuge.

After unlocking and throwing open the door on my red 1999 Pontiac Grand Am, I waited for the heat wave to escape the oven that was my interior before getting in. The stale air slowly mingled with the barely cooler air outside. I got in and instantly regretted leaving the house in mid-afternoon. I should have waited until evening to run to the store, but it was too late now. I sat down on the hot fabric seat and cranked the car to life. I couldn’t burn myself on black cloth but I could sure feel the heat long after the windows had been rolled down and the A/C was cranked.

Driving downtown with my face melting off, there wasn’t a soul outside that didn’t have to be. And the one’s who were out didn’t have the energy to glance at who was coming down the street. We lived on the far West side of town but Julio’s Supermarket was on the North side of downtown. In a town of 1,500 it was only a few blocks and a few minutes’ drive to the store. I parked in the front since today I was a shopper and not a checker. Not that Julio would’ve cared anyway. The cars in the parking lot were few, and no one could blame me for wanting to get in and get out as quick as I could.

Julio’s Supermarket was the only grocery store in town, and its owners were the only Hispanic family in town. The store was good size and well established, Julio had inherited it from his father twenty years ago and had been building onto it ever since. Now it harbored a bakery, deli, and flower shop in conjunction with a fully stocked grocery. Julio, the owner and my boss, was 400 pounds of friendly humor. He literally shook when he laughed and his deep and bold guffaws begged one to laugh with him like he was an old friend. He was quick with praise and gentle with rebukes and had permanent laugh lines etched around his bright syrup colored eyes and wide white smile. Unlike the rest of his quiet family, who mostly kept to themselves, Julio made the effort to get to know all of his customers. In the twenty years that he’d owned the store, that constituted the entire population of Atlantis, South Dakota as well as dozens of other regular shoppers from neighboring small towns. About half a dozen of us teenagers worked in his store, and he had promised me that even though I was going off to college at Kodiak next month, there would always be a summer job for me here. I had been working for Julio since I was 15 and even though he was the only boss I had ever had, I was convinced there would be no boss better than him. 

Hey Maria! How you enjoying the heat, eh? Julio boomed across the store to me. It was a wonder that neither his voice nor his lumbering steps shook the store.

The few customers at the checkouts turned to look at Julio who came shuffling down an aisle towards me. Usually everyone just smiled at his boisterousness, but today a couple of eye rolls and sighs escaped from the customers at the combination of heat and enjoying in the same sentence. Stuffy weather makes for stuffy people.

Enjoying it almost as much as you calling me Maria! I shouted back across the cashier lanes. The melting shoppers re-focused their attention on their cashiers and ignored our bantering.

Ever since Julio had met and hired me he had called me Maria instead of Marie. I had corrected him more than a dozen times in the first few months I had worked here, but eventually gave in to the fact that he would never get it right. It wasn’t that he was slow or anything, I think he just enjoyed getting me riled up and taunting me.

Knowing it was payday we both walked over to the side counter where cigarettes and lottery tickets were sold. The shelves underneath the counter were a nightmare, as usual. It was a conglomeration of papers, envelopes, order forms, delivery forms, advertisements, sticky notes, and who knew what else. But Julio somehow always knew where to find whatever he needed.

Aye Dios mio, Maria! You’re going to bleed me dry if you don’t take some time off this summer and go do something fun, he joked as he pulled my envelope out of a stack on the second shelf. You only have a few weeks before school, yes? Why don’t you go on a road trip or to a concert like every other teenager? I rolled my eyes at the thoughts of those activities. I had always been a bit of a loner and neither one of them would be very fun by myself. I enjoyed my job, and it made me feel good to have saved up so much for college. And there was still more to save for. Whatever free time I had when I couldn’t work, I was perfectly content to spend reading.

"You know, bosses usually don’t encourage teenagers to take more time off, I said as I took my check. And besides, where am I going to go? And who’s going to save money for my textbooks while I’m gone?"

Julio just laughed and brushed away the thought of textbooks, "What are books compared to experience, eh? You’ve got to live your life, Maria. Hard work is important, but you have to have fun too, girl. Ack! Youth is wasted on the young," he mumbled as he lumbered away towards the back.

I rolled my eyes and smiled as I shouted to his back, I’ll go where it’s snowing and bring you back a souvenir!

Haha! Just don’t melt before you get there, Maria! he bellowed without turning around.

I walked out of the store into the blistering heat, shielding my eyes from the sun. What did it matter if I spent my summers working and saving money? Wasn’t that what every parent and boss wanted of people my age anyway? Julio said I had to live my life and have fun. But I was living, I was breathing and moving wasn’t I? And fun would come once I got out of town and met new people in college. People who wouldn’t know every little detail about me like all my old high school classmates did. People with whom I could start fresh. .

As I drove back home I focused on the shimmering heat that rose off of the cement street in the distance. The heat looked like a big puddle of water, its rivulets glinting in the sun. I remembered back when I was a kid and I would stare intently out the windshield at the disappearing puddles while my mom was driving. It perplexed me for so long how the puddles could look so big but always dried up before we reached them. My mom had noticed me glaring out the windshield one day while she was driving on the highway and asked me what I was so intent about. I finally asked her about the puddles and she laughed and told me it was just heat waves coming off the cement. There weren’t any puddles there. It was an illusion.

I drove just a little faster in pursuit of the puddle in front of me, knowing that I would never catch it.

It was an illusion.

Just like the memories I have now of that day.

Illusions.

Mortal man has not the power to draw aside the veil of unborn time to tell the future of his race. That gift belongs to the Great Spirit alone.

–Simon Pokagon, Potawatomi.