Children of the sunrise - by Christopher K. Travis

The first time he appeared, it didn't seem all that out of the ordinary. I had just saved Annie Oakley from a nefarious band of outlaws and was on my way to pitch at the World Series. What was so odd about a butt-naked little black boy walking out of a mirage?


I was eight years old, and knew I was destined to be a scientist and a super hero. In my imagination, future generations listed me amongst the greatest names in human history... Goddard, Edison, Madam Curie, Barbarella, Doctor Strange, Tom Corbett and the Space Rangers and Tom Bowie from Texas. Thomas Jefferson Bowie, as my mother had named me. I dreamed I was a hero waiting to happen.


The world occured for me on the cusp of magic and elementary science. Salt crystals on a string and sweet potato roots growing in a glass of water were no more real or less magical than trips to Mars or the ninth dimension. I had this theory at the time (I've always been big on theories) that if you squinted your eyes while looking into the refraction caused by heat waves you should be able to break open the fabric of reality and see alternate worlds. The alternate world I was searching for was China, the distinction between geography and the physics of parallel worlds being a bit blurred at the time. China and Never Never Land coexisted on the planet of my fancies.


I was lying under the shadow of a big chinaberry tree at the edge of the cotton field on my father's panhandle farm. I could hear Floyd Cramer's Magic Touch album tinkling across the plowed field from an open window at the house. Mom was probably playing it for the fourth or fifth time in a row. I was squinting at the heat rising off the narrow piece of blacktop that runs just the other side of the irrigation ditch when I began to see a hazy shadow in the waves.