"In Latin my name, Aurelia, basically means 'the golden one.' My mother literally named me her golden light through the storm that was her life. That is my job. To be everyone's light at the end of the tunnel. And I got stuck worrying so much about...
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Aurelia was anxious.
The sun had begun to set. The sky turned a bizarre mix of purple and yellow. Typically, she would find some comfort in the pretty view. But there was this gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach like something bad was going to happen. Like something awful was going to jump out at them.
"How much farther?" she asked as Hazel turned inland.
"Yeah, are you sure this is a good idea?" Leo added.
"We're close," Hazel promised. "Come on."
Just over the dunes, they saw a woman. She sat on a boulder in the middle of a grassy field. A black-and-chrome motorcycle was parked nearby, but each of the wheels had a big pie slice removed from the spokes and rim, so that they resembled Pac-Men. No way was the bike driveable in that condition.
The woman had lucious brown hair, and a loveable, full frame. She wore black leather biker pants, tall leather boots, and a blood red leather jacket—a Hell's Angels look. Around her feet, the ground was littered with what looked like broken shells. She was hunched over, pulling new ones out of a sack and cracking them open. Was she shucking oysters? Can you get oysters in the Great Salt Lake?
Aurelia felt her emotions. Anger, annoyance and ... revenge. That was an emotion she didn't read off of people often. And it made her very uneasy.
She was ready to turn away but Hazel forged ahead. Aurelia looked at Leo, who looked and felt just uneasy as she did, but the two reluctantly followed Hazel.
As they got closer, Aurelia noticed disturbing details. Attached to the woman's belt was a curled whip. Her red-leather jacket had a subtle design to it—twisted branches of an apple tree populated with skeletal birds. The oysters she was shucking were actually fortune cookies.
A pile of broken cookies lay ankle-deep all around her. She kept pulling new ones from her sack, cracking them open, reading the fortunes. Most she tossed aside. A few made her mutter unhappily. She would swipe her finger over the slip of paper like she was smudging it, then magically reseal the cookie and toss it into a nearby basket.
Aurelia felt weirded out. She looked around a little more, trying to assess if there was another threat.
"What are you doing?" Leo asked.
The woman looked up. Leo was shocked. "Aunt Rosa?"
Aurelia was confused. The woman's face was blurry to her. Shifting forms as if it couldn't decide on a face. All the faces that passed were unfamiliar to her.
