Prologue: An Explosive Arrival

 It was Sunday, August 5th, 1945 in Chokoloskee, Florida at 7:15 PM.  A woman screamed out in the pangs of labor by lantern light, one last hard push. A healthy baby boy was born, to the mother and the midwife's great relief.

It was at that exact moment, thousands of miles away in Japan, 7:15 A.M. on Monday morning, August 6th. An impossibly bright light to fast for any sound vaporized part of Hiroshima, and tens of thousands of souls were ejected from this earthly life. Sometimes I wonder if they were all compressed by the blast into the newborn body of this one child, as a sort of way that the Universe could make up a little for their lost fates.

His mother named him Willie. Willie Orville Wisp. After that, Lucille Wisp collapsed back onto the small iron-framed bed, while her newborn son washed, swaddled, and cradled at her breast.

Lucie Wisp was no wilting flower, but after twenty hours of labor, anyone would be exhausted in the humid heat of the Florida Everglades.

Lucie had never dreamed of having a child at the end of the Earth, but sometimes life has another plan for you. There's no way you could be further into the Everglades than Chokoloskee unless you were on a boat in the mangrove swamp. The storm that had chased her so far away from civilization was a man meaner than she was strong, and she refused to speak his name.

She looked with exhausted eyes at her newborn son. He had a little wisp of reddish hair, and a sort of pale blue eyes with small gold flecks in them. "He'll be green-eyed like me." she thought. Lucie had pale green eyes, and you could almost mistake them for a sort of yellow in certain light. 

With that she drifted off as the midwife moved her son to a bassinet, and went about cleaning up the room where the exhausted new mother lay sleeping.

Not long after, the evening faded to a swampy dusk, and the last of the season's lightning bugs began to glow outside the open window, with its gift of a salty zephyr to cool the coming night.