Pitched

By Courtney Caswell-Peyton

Pre—college aged Palevia is more-than-pissed when she is forced to live in Communist China after her mother is accused of a food contamination murder in the United States.  Finding herself homeless on a hillside when she is ousted by a host family that was supposed to protect her, she meets flirty Shoa.

Shoa invites Palevia on a would-be Christian campout as a first date, but when they both arrive to discover that it is Nazi training and Shoa still wants to participate, Palevia is afraid to reveal that she is actually Jewish.

It is at this instant that she knows that she must embark on a courageous and spellbinding journey to choose between love of others, love of career or love of self.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781794733473

Book preview

Pitched

Courtney Caswell-Peyton

Published by Lulu.com, 2019.

Table of Contents

Pitched

Table of Contents

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Pitched Out

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Chapter One Part One: Red

Chapter One: Part Two: Stranger No More

Chapter Two: Flee

Chapter Three: Hosted Helpers

Chapter Four: Pitched Out

Love Pitch

Chapter Five:  Part One:  Yellow

Chapter Five Part Two:  Love Pitch

Chapter Six: Ethical Echoes

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Pitch In

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Chapter Seven part one: Bluegreen

Chapter Seven:  Pitch In

Solo

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Chapter Eight:  Part One:  Gray

Chapter Eight:  Part Two:  Solo or Silenced?

ASIDE and AFTERWORD

PATCH POWER

Chapter Nine:  Patch Power

PITCHED

By Courtney Caswell-Peyton

Pitched Out

Chapter One, Part One: Red

PRESENT DAY CHINA

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Nian Zhan’s introduction to morning was a wrestle.  Normally neat, tidy and beautiful even at bedtime, Nian Zhan was now face-to-face with uncertain darkness rather than the burgeoning day’s typical sun streaks through the slits of her partition.  She had no idea whether she was her characteristic chiseled self as she kicked and flayed through the thick reversible red Sherpa blanket past the darkness and the odor of smoke.  No, beautiful women didn’t smoke of course, The smell was from a build- up of years of the blanket’s travels from indoors to out.  The smell of dirt.  The smell of Earth covered over by the politeness of fragrant detergent and today, the smell of anger. 

Apparently, this t was going to be anything but sunny and totally new as an angry voice that she could actually hear in her head yet had never heard before, snapped back at her.  你怎么敢把她踢出去.  (How dare you kick her out). This voice was unfamiliar and very unfriendly.  Straight away, the same red of the reversible Sherpa blanket flashed before her.  A temporary blindness.

Red might be relevant throughout the ties of time, but she was not the angry one at this moment.  It was the adamant vibration of a stranger.  And, seconds later, it was her almost college bound daughter who came flying through the door to Nian’s room just behind the last shake of the invader’s unexpected verbal boom.  你要把我踢出去 (You’re going to kick me out, aren’t you?)  Her daughter was poised, but clenched, too proud to don any sort of expression of helpless pleading—no matter how slight.

Already knowing the answer, Palevia turned away from her mother before she could speak.  She’d been having the same recurring dream for months now.  Her mother walks into her room at least once a day, appraises the space in Palevia’s absence, and mercilessly removes one item at a time until every inkling of personality and humanness is gone.  Sometimes the items are torn and thrown carelessly into a neighboring space; sometimes they are thrown out the window all together.  Palevia was sure that at a random time in the future, she herself would be tossed out like any old item clogging up a space.  For, there had been limited connection between her and her mother for years—something that was, in no way, Palevia’s fault.

Nian Zhan had returned to the crimson ire of Communist China from the more stable America in search of low rent with which to resume her food business.  In America, food was at least somewhat of a certain profit because there was not as much entitlement in democracy as there was in Communism.  And food was clean and uncontroversial, regulated, and safe.  But food was also expensive.  Nian’s rent rose from nowhere and almost overnight, she felt pushed out of freedom and back into frantic frailty. 

Nian returned to China seemingly upbeat.  But she was silent about the whirling of her real inner-thoughts.  So anger was probably mounting, unawares.  When Nian returned to the Red world, she busied herself to quickly re-establish her income.  This made it appear to outsiders as though Nian had no daughter whatsoever.  No one had ever seen Palevia in China.  And even in America, Palevia preferred to distance herself from the pungency of mustiness and the sickening pools of colored, watery sweat that were customary in the back rooms of a labor business.  This distance left mother and daughter almost completely separate most days and Palevia to wander the seemingly safe, but still sketchy streets in search of some other profitable way to occupy her time.  It mostly left silence.  Red silence simmered underneath the surface for both of them.  Mother, because her decision to move had added unwelcome stress and was only partially voluntary; daughter, because she was ambivalently thrust from the freedom that she felt had become her right over the years.  Palevia had very deliberately tossed the reality of her Chinese birth aside to melt into modern American life.

Palevia made no effort whatsoever to turn and wait patiently for her mother’s response.  Instead, she trudged toward her room slowly, fully expecting to find something else missing if she’d bothered to look carefully enough.  Things would disappear just like in her incessantly looping dream until maybe only she remained.  Though, she had hoped to definitely be out of range of this red stranger’s resurfacing and his next hotly tempered demand when and if that time should ever come again.

Palevia made no obvious order conscious effort to case her room upon her return.  She plopped sloppily atop het crisp bedspread, closed her eyes and drifted quite quickly into the obliviousness of heavy R.E.M. sleep.  Nian had long since abandoned the idea of chasing after her daughter or forcing her into any communication corners.  She was just as used to the distance between them as her drifting daughter was.  So she went about dinner looking after dinner choosing to follow the odor of fullness rather than to trail the tears of emptiness.  She headed toward her kitchen trying desperately to plug her nose just enough so as not to be nauseated by the thickness of a hearty heated meal. As she entered, a sour scent overtook her and an over-boiling from her lack of attention left the crusty smoldering of the pot’s contents more than visible.  Had she been as hungry as the height of her pot might have suggested, she might have been satiated.  Though the unattended dry drips and smell of burning were in no way as appetizing as the hot meal before the cool might have been.

Then, just as she was to turn from the burning in her kitchen to the cool freshness of her causeway, the voice of the red stranger echoed again.  You are a stranger to her—accused. 你对她的被告是一个陌生人.

Nian wanted to shout back, to defend herself.  She wanted anyone else to believe that would listen that today she felt unbelievably barraged.  Even if Palevia wanted to ignore her now for the years of adolescence that slipped by unseen and undocumented, and even if some of her flawless beauty was now largely scarred by the tainting of Neglect that compromised to a plague the health and beauty of others, she deserved not to have these facts looming over her in every hour of what should be peace.

Nian crept toward her living room window to gaze out at the bustling strangers below.  Many of them blurred into the others around them or into the distance.  But the ones that she could see clearly all appeared to be scarred by several red blisters on their skin that seemed to pop up from what was most likely infectious oil or puss below.  She felt, first, a sense of compassion then a quick twist to revulsion as she looked away as rapidly as her eyes would retreat.  She wondered if anything in this cheap red world would be clean or pure ever again.  If it wasn’t, she wondered if she could really live with that.  Again, the Red stranger echoed,  You must be a stranger no more.

The decibel rush made Nian trip over what she realized was her reversible red Sherpa blanket.  She tripped once, twice, and then found herself entangled, almost smothered by fuzz that she would sputter out once she could worm her way back to clear sight and easy breathing once again.  She wrestled and wrestled.  She wriggled and wriggled.  Finally, the whoosh of punching at air followed by an elongated tearing sound might actually mean that the anger of the red world trying to nest itself cozily in her precious reversible red Sherpa was weakened just enough to scurry away for now.  When Nian thrust past the whoosh and the sputter, all which remained were shreds of velour lying below.  As she knelt down to salvage the largest chunks of what was once warm comfort, the shred that she grabbed at flew, first into her face, and then drifted into nowhere.  All that was left was one minuscule scrap.  She left it in the same spot purposely, testing...telling herself that there was no way that scraps of cloth had minds or movements of there own.  And for once at the very end of the day, there was no red in sight.

Go, Nian whispered.

Go, a bit louder now.

Go!  Louder still.

Unaware that her muttering to herself was now distinctly audible, Nian turned to notice Palevia posed and frozen, seemingly uncertain as to whether she should bolt out the door immediately or not.  Seeing on the shadowy figure or her mother directly ahead and noticing no way around her toward the front door, Palevia decided to remain frozen and save her bolting for the brighter day ahead.

The next morning, at exactly the cracked light of dawn, the creaking and shushing of the front door opening awakened Nian.  Groggy, she still had the semblance of mind for a thought.  I shouldn’t trail after her.  She’s terrified.  Then, wanting to delay the pain of her daughter’s obvious departure fro: the house to destinations unknown at such early hours, she allowed her eyes to close and her mind to drift back to sleep land.  A few short hours later, however, slumber had lost its hold and the unnatural quiet caused a panic.  Nian slammed her palms on the bed beside her and whispered clenched and wistful, I’m still a stranger, goddamit.  Again, this time in reverse.  Goddamiit, I’m still a stranger.

PREENT DAY CHINA

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Chapter One Part Two:  Stranger No More

Just past her mother’s front door, as dawn morphs into cloak of gray and blue powdered fog that will eventually burst into the sunlit space of mid-morning, the lawn sprinkler spit and sputtered promising cool relief to an otherwise hotly battered to flat lawn.  Palevia gazes dreamily toward the water, imaging herself as a little girl again, twirling and squirming through the water flow to avoid breaking a sweat.  Up to this point, her over the threshold rebellion was in no way well thought out.  She was pretty much frozen and succumbing easily to the trance brought on by the pounding of water pressure through a hose.  Though as the grass misted tears of joy into a shield that would survive another day’s heat, and silence ruled the air again, Palevia’s awareness returned.

She looked every which way but back at her mother’s front door, paused before deciding on a direction, and then just as she was going to bolt senselessly to anywhere, hurling sounds broke her concentration and a thick river of red, yellow and light brown fluid was trying its deepest to block her path. The river was odorless at first, so as long as Palevia might be inclined to stare at the ever-reaching and seemingly unstoppable span of its flow, this intensity most likely wouldn’t have sickened her.  Though as the river became more pussy and gelatinous in nature, Palevia knew that a long gaze anywhere near it could cause her to form that pussy taste in her own mouth and to unleash her detests anywhere on the ground below where bile might like to fall. This possibility was paralyzing and the idea that goo would plop on her shoe or spatter to her clothes she had hoped was unavoidable all together.

She had wondered if the sound that she heard was actually puke itself or whether, more optimistically, it was the gurgling of an antiquated air vent and nothing more than the spill over of a leak on already gray concrete.  Her curiosity was impatient, but there seemed to be no way to know immediately as lunging forward would require a two inch jump over the pussy mixture and missing a step or a leap was most definitely not an option.  She settled for thrusting her torso forward and directly parallel to the goo below and darting her eyes forward and sideways to look for a pallid, albeit shadowy figure or two.  She held this forward balance for some time less than two but more than one minute, before paying too close attention to the fact that she wasn’t standing straight, envisioning her stomach as a pipeline for a goo similar to what lay below, and almost totally losing her balance.  The darting forward sprint of an identified figure combined with a clattering that sounded like a game of pickup sticks gone awry kept her mind focused on consciousness and balance blessed her still.  Her mind knew full well, however, that it would be best to somehow try to creep past this ever-expanding shield of poisonous looking snot to investigate the inhabitants of the other side. 

Palevia slowly stretched to full vertical and allowed any fluid that might want to settle at the bottom of her stomach to digest before skulking over the goo pathway.  Her eyes fixed steadily forward allowed her to notice that the clattering pick up sticks appeared to be needles of some variety.  Then finally making it to the general area where the shadowy figure had been standing, she did not notice him or her now, only the long piles of metal, a smaller pile of pussy goo and an apparently collapsed, unconscious and uncommunicative person.

Seeing no signs of even moaning and groaning from the collapsed person and no shadowy figure even courteous enough to retreat into the foreground to count how many rubberneckers might be interested in the corpulent status of this person, Palevia was left pensive and merely to wonder the exact sequence of events that led up to this death.  Was it an overdose?  A poisoning?  A traffic hit and a poisoning?  She ventured closer to this immobilized stranger than any level of her courage in life thus far might have otherwise allowed.  She looked squarely at the eyes, then the whole face—carefully until she was sure that there was no chance that this might spontaneously revive itself.  She thought that death might be OK to