Becky Mushko

I'm working on a YA novel, tentatively titled What the Dogs Told Me. So far, I have eleven chapters and fragments of a few others for this novel about a young animal communicator who tries to deny her gift but is eventually forced to reveal it. Here's the opening paragraph:

Sometimes I think my gift is more a curse than anything else, for it separates me from other people, so I generally don’t let it be known that animals tell me things. “Folks think you’re tetched if you go around saying things like that,” my great-aunt Myrie once told me. She also has the gift, although her gift is not like mine.  I keep quiet, so most of the kids at school don’t even notice I’m around. I always sit by myself in the back of the bus. But I notice them. And I know more about them than they can imagine.

I've re-written this opening more than a dozen times. The story, set mostly in the fall of 1972, takes place in the Appalachian mountains and is told from the POV of the protagonist, 17-year-old Annie Barlow, a shy girl who has the gift of conversing with animals. Annie wishes she didn't have her gift, for it sets her apart from others. Only her Aunt Myrie understands.

 The oldest girl in every other generation in Annie's family has a gift, though the gifts are not always the same. Aunt Myrie, for instance,  has the gift of speaking with the dead, but only in the place where they died.

 Annie visits Aunt Myrie's cabin in the woods almost daily. I imagine the woods she walks through look like my woods.

After reading Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken" in English class, Annie wonders if she can take another road in life. That afternoon, she asks Aunt Myrie:

“Aunt Myrie,” I said, “has anybody in our family ever given up our gift?”

She looked at me like I was addled. “Why would a body want to do that?”

“To be normal,” I said. “To be just like everyone else.”

She leaned over the oilcloth tablecloth and looked me square in the eye. “There ain’t no normal. Ain’t no one person ever been like another. Even twins is different, for all that they might look alike.”

She hadn’t answered my question, so I asked again. “But has any ever given up the gift?”

She reached across the table and took my hand. “None that I know of,” she said. “At times the gift might be a heavy burden to bear, but it was give to us for a reason. It ain’t ours to refuse.” She turned my hand so it was palm up and studied it in the firelight.

“What do you see?” I asked.

She shrugged. “What you already know. Plus I ain’t all that good at palm reading. My grandma, now, she could take one look and tell you more about yourself than you’d ever learn in your lifetime.” 

The above scene, a few chapters into the book, is still a work-in-progress. I might rewrite it again.

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