Prologue

I sat in front of my computer having just finished reading another time travel story on SOL and dreamed at what point in my life that I would like to go back to. At the age of 52 years old, my body was indeed a train wreck. over my lifetime I had so many broken bones, and a few shattered joints that even sitting for any length of time caused pain.

The fact that I had diabetes and already went through two heart attacks did not help either. my eyes were starting to fail me making me lose one of my few joys ... reading a good book.

That was the main reason for online stories, I could make the font as large as I needed to read it. thinking back to a point before I had any major physical problems was harder than I thought since I was raised in a damn farming orphanage in south Texas. the things they were allowed to do to children would be considered child abuse by today's standards.

I mean really, who sends a ten year old 60 lbs boy out to feed 30 to 40 hogs weighing from 200 to 500 lbs in the damn dark. have you ever tried to sneak into a damn hog pasture with a bag of feed that weighed almost what you do? Yep, the hogs would and did run me over getting to the feed trough. Given that all of them outweighed me at least 2 or 3 times I was lucky to get out of the pasture with just a few broken ribs and a bust arm. Hooray! my first cast!

I sat smiling at the memory of the children's home administrator explaining to the doctor why it was normal at the home to work us kids like slaves. Of course this was before all the hoopla of child protective services and thus nothing would be done. But still that time wasn't too bad since it got me moved from the hogs to the dairy we ran. Yeah! A ten year old sporting a newly casted arm milking cows only 20 times his own body weight.

We didn't have the fancy milking machines at that time so it was done by hand, my hands to be exact and two other unfortunate older boys. Now getting up every day at 4:00am might not be bad for some people but I hated it. Still compared to later it was a time of good things or rather a time of total ignorance on my part. my sister at 11 years old, my brother at 8 years old and myself at 5 years old were dumped at the children's home by my uncle when he found out our father had died and our mother just up and left us on a drinking binge.

It turns out that uncle Fred thought he could get the social security that our father had paid into the state. guess what? Nope he couldn't since he wasn't listed as our guardian and didn't care to take the time to go through all the damn paper work. So he loaded all three of us up telling us about a really neat places with horses and cow and pigs we could pet and dropped us off at the front door of the administrator's house. Dear Uncle Fred got back in his car and we never heard from him again.

Well needless to say at 5 I was not only scared to death but had never been in the country before and thought it would be neat to pet a cow and a pig. Ha!

The orphanage was not like to ones in most cities where they are a large dormitory type buildings oh no this one was based on family style with a married couple in each home and 12 to 18 kids crammed into 3 bedrooms. It really did not help much that the first thing this asshole did was split us up into different homes. Can you imagine tearing a family apart after the dad had just died and their mother just left them to fend for themselves? Not to mention good old Uncle Fred. yep that's what they did though. I only saw my brother and sister at chapel every morning and we had to sit with our own housemates anyway.

So they manage to drive any feeling of being siblings completely out of the three of us really well. We were now strangers to each other, Hell I didn't get to go to my own sister's wedding when she finally got the brains to marry her boyfriend that didn't live in the home!

Not that I cared by that time, I didn't know her anyway.

So how would I pick a time in my life when so much of it was screwed up so early? The answer revolved around pain. A busted arm and a few cracked ribs where nothing compared to what would happen later at the hell hole.

So for me the best time would have to be when I met old man White across the road. He had bought the place when I turned 12 and was looking for some really cheap labor to help set up the horse stalls and such.

I laughed at the memory of the old man dickering with me to get my undying loyalty for 60 cents an hour. To a kid who literally never had a single cent in his 12 years of life, that sounded like a hell of a lot of money!

Shoot, I had never had a new anything at that time. All my clothes were third or fourth hand-me-downs and patched beyond recognition. I think they started life as blue jeans but you couldn't really tell by the time I got them.

Chapter 1 »