Shella Hated Raisins

Shella Hated Raisins Treatment: Dramedy Short, 31 pp. Shella, 21 and beautiful, and Rudie, 19 and lackluster, are sisters at Oklahoma State University. They have totally different lives. Shella will be spending her Spring Break at Ft. Lauderdale, Florida coast, with her sparkly sorority sisters. Rudie will be spending her Spring Break on the Comanche Reservation, further deepening her Native American Studies. But their estranged father, Daddy, whom they have not seen in years, falls off a mountain in his adopted getaway, Bisbee, Arizona, and nearly kills himself. That puts the kabash on their Spring Break plans. The Oklahoma girls must spend Spring Break at the V.A. Hospital in Tucson. Rudie wants very much to see her beloved Daddy again, but Shella believes that Daddy is a disloyal dip-shit who abandoned them in their early childhood years. When they arrive at the hospital, they discover that Daddy has a visitor who has not left his side. It is Myrtle, their long lost first cousin who was abandoned by her parents and raised in the foster care system. Myrtle is strange and emanates an air of iffy ruination. Their mama always said, “Poor little Myrtle, headed for the slammer.” Daddy is happy to see his daughters and gives Shella a wad of cash. To Rudie, he gives a cherished possession which she thought had been destroyed. It is a very old kachina with a wolf face that was her favorite playmate when she was three years old, named Old Dog Boy. Old Dog Boy was sent to Daddy long before his girls were born, back when he was recovering from his stint in the Gulf War. The kachina was sent to Daddy as a gift from the grandfather of a Hopi soldier rescued by Daddy under fire. Old Dog Boy is from the Second Mesa in northern Arizona and is over a hundred-fifty years old. When Rudie holds Old Dog Boy for the first time in fifteen years, she remembers the wonderful and mysterious power he gave her, and she remembers how he enabled her to trick Shella, who was always a domineering older bitch of a sister. With Old Dog Boy’s help, Rudie made Shella eat earth worms and lizards! He gave Rudie a special supernatural power. Mama thought that Old Dog Boy had been burned up in the trash, but Daddy had pulled him out and saved him in his fishing tackle-box. And now, Rudie is reconciled with a personable and magical entity that will change everything. She will need Old Dog Boy, because her first cousin Myrtle has begun an organ-harvesting enterprise with the help of her second and fifth husband, Frankie Franks, south of the border in Naco, Mexico. Their clandestine partner, the professional who does the precision cutting, is Roland Low Pond, a Mexican who has convinced himself that he is a full-blood Apache. Old Dog Boy advises Rudie as his dearest “Baby Girl” pushes Low Pond into a full-blown identity crisis. Rudie escapes in Apache style, like the Apache Roland Low Pond thought he was-- with Roland’s scalp attached to her belt loop. Old Dog Boy is overjoyed to be with Rudie again. He is her Spirit Handler. Facts regarding further developments past the initial short: The cool thing about Hopi Kachinas: they are actually powerful spirits who come into our planet and return periodically to the San Francisco peaks of the Rockies near Flagstaff, Arizona. Each kachina is a holy trinity: 1) an eternal nature spirit, or animal, or plant, star, or even a memory; 2) a tangible material object and hand-carved sacred doll given to children for support, instruction, and protection; and 3) a living spirit that enters into the body of male Hopi dancers during the sacred dances of the Hopi tribe. For future story-development, Rudie may actually meet the young man who becomes Old Dog Boy in the Hopi dances on the Second Mesa, the man who is Old Dog Boy. And Rudie herself may actually discover that she is also a kachina: an eternal spirit, a hand-carved doll kachina representing that spirit, and she may even grow to inhabit a dancer in the tribal dance with Old Dog Boy. But they are a couple, Rudie and Old Dog Boy, gifted with remarkable detective skills that change circumstances.