Exposition and Segue

     Now, how is the story of Briar Dallas different from the thousands of other abused, neglected children in this modern world? Choose which to address first, for there are two exceptional things which set Briar aside from those around her, closely tied together. She was a medium, and possessed of an exceptional artistic talent.

     Briar Dallas saw ghosts. She spoke to ghosts. She heard ghosts. Wraiths, disgruntled spirits, incorporeal beings, the dead… Any name you would care to put to it, the fact remained the same: Briar had always been able to see and interact with ghosts. Despite the claims throughout the world, true talent as a medium is a rare thing, and the spectres who flocked to Briar on a nigh-well daily basis knew this. Each ghost came to Briar with a story to tell, a request to make, or simply to demand someone acknowledge their presence. Some, drawn by the misery which had surrounded her from her birth, stayed to drink in the sight of someone more unhappy than themselves. There were even those who took their frustrated rage, misery and disappointment out on the slender girl. It was far too easy for the ghosts to torment Briar. They had access to the depths of her mind, and even though she learned early on to ‘wall away’ thoughts that could give ghosts more bullets to use against her, there was always an enterprising spirit that could slide around the mental barriers to search out some clever pain to needle her with.
     A few ghosts were charmed by the little girl and her forthright way with them. For Briar, ghosts were not an abnormality; they were one of the few reliable things in her life. Ghosts had always been there and would always be there. It wasn’t something that she took for granted, it was merely an attitude born of adaptation. These spirits laughed at her scowling face, soothed her nightmares with stories about their own childhood and, when they could, protected her from some of the worse torments of other wraiths. It was a ghost who told Briar that her older brother Andrew, who she could hardly recall, was dead. It was a ghost who taught Briar to sneak Ben-Gay out of her foster father’s medicine cabinet and use it to soothe her aching joints. A particularly caring ghost broke a vase on one foster mother’s head before the woman could beat Briar for some imagined slight. Ghosts were part of her existence, and while the young Briar knew no other life, she did wonder sometimes what would have become of her without the few incorporeal friends she had.

     Inexplicably tied to her medium abilities were her artistic ones. Briar had been of a creative bent since she was born, and it was, in fact, a ghost who realized the potential in the thin lines a toddler traced in the sand outside her back door. Crayons were Briar’s favorite toys, and unlike most children, she showed no interest in eating them or scribbling on the walls. (She did, however, draw a cat on her bedroom door at the age of three.) The little girl used pieces of black construction paper to sharpen her crayons to fine points, rubbing them with the dedication of a twenty-year-old art student. With the pointed tips, she sketched, nodding her head as she tried mimicking on paper what she saw with her eyes. Briar often nodded as she drew, and while her mother was still alive, she found it charming. After Briar entered the realm of foster homes, she avoided drawing around her ‘families,’ but still, she nodded to herself, shading with the side of a colour pencil, using her pinky finger to blend.
     Why she nodded was clear to Briar and would have made absolutely no sense to anyone else: she was acknowledging and agreeing with good advice. Of course, having a wraithly mentor over one’s shoulder, dictating how to use light and shadow to create a sense of the extraordinary is something no other artist has ever claimed. Briar’s artistic ability developed by leaps and bounds, partly through her own genius, and partly due to the long-dead artists who hovered over her shoulder and gave her the wisdom of their experience.
     In Briar’s hands, all forms of art, all mediums, if you’ll pardon the pun, came to life. At first it was crayons, washable markers and colour pencils. She progressed to pencil, ink pen and finer markers. Play-Doh, clay, mud and paper took new shape under her fingers, and the cheap watercolour sets given to every child in elementary school were a prized treasure. She drew, sculpted, sketched and painted on every scrap of paper that came her way, and she used every possible image she could. By the time Briar Dallas was thirteen, she had the artistic ability of an art professor. When the chance came her way, she tried pastels, oils, acrylics, charcoal, tempuras, modeling clay, sculpting clay, papier mache, styrofoam, wood, stone, watercolours and sand. There was nothing Briar wouldn’t put her hand to, nothing she would step away from without having created something of beauty.

     As her life and learning progressed, when Briar was physically able, she would daydream of having her own studio, of creating the images in her head with free rein. Limited by lack of medium, time and space to create, Briar filled school notebook after notebook with frustrated sketches, seeking an outlet for the creativity that kept her from utterly losing her mind. When Briar found a crumpled tattoo magazine in her foster father’s home, she found an entirely new medium. With her mind buzzing, she sketched and drew designs for tattoos incorporating everything she could possibly imagine. Her favorite subject was dragons, followed by wild animals. Imagining the possibilities of skin as a canvas, she sketched with muscle tone and movement in mind. Fascinated by the possibilities, she began hoarding what little money she had in order to buy sketchbooks and pencils.
     Art was Briar’s escape; the only one she had. Through art, she survived abuse that would have left others lost in their own broken mind. Art let her slough the horrors that the vicious wraiths flooded her mind with. It was her only release, and Briar guarded her hands devotedly. With everything that happened, she kept her hands intact. A monumental task, but one that Briar took seriously: her art was everything.

     These were the two factors that drew Briar’s tale beyond the commonplace, away from the everyday of abuse and neglect. Briar herself, had these things been missing, would have certainly been diminished, and never would have found herself where she did after running away from the sixth foster home: living in an abandoned apartment building, trying to attend public school and working for a tattoo artist at night.
     And these two factors were what brought Briar Dallas to a small bookstore when she was fourteen years old and living on her own in Willington, West Virginia.