Winter Goals

Today I started sketching out some storyboards for Volume One of Oso Arcilla’s “Wild Stripes”. It’s an amazing, on-going account of one man’s adventure through a fantastic world of the strange and unusual. I’m incredibly excited and privileged to take on this huge project.. and can’t wait to see how it turns out! Woot woot

Wild Stripes, Volume One

As Told By Oso Arcilla

It wasnt until the seconds before, at the bottom with the stinking lake water slamming at the rocks beneath my feet, standing for the first time since my small wooden boat splintered against the massive, jagged chunks of white volcanic rock, that I was stricken with the urge, the desperate need, to walk on solid ground away from this wet hole.

Years had passed between the loss of my boat and the  moment I turned to inspect the cliff face. It was the water that posessed me in my lonlieness on those rocks, how it rose and fell in a hypnotic waltz. I thought of nothing else but the dancing currents of twirling tides, pulsing outward on the surface and flooding back below. While it was constantly shifting, refusing any sort of stability, it never changed. One small crest was the next foamy back-splash at my shins, and my clothes stank of rotting algae.

Resolute, I considered my escape. The cliff face that used to loom over me in the nights now seemed only a few lengths above my head. Careful planning would take me to the top but I had no patience for it. I shot up the rock like a tiny clawed lizard, never looking down, moving with instinct and dexterity among the sand and stones now raining down upon my former resting place.

The tips of my fingers found the edge of a flat dusty plateau and I swung my leg over to meet solid ground. Sprawled over the threshold, I noticed my fingers and bare toes were split open and weeping, but i welcomed the pain, drank in the sweet nector of my labors pouring down my limbs.

I lifted myself to face the lake and upon the sight of it I was uncontrollably rent apart with screams. I saw no one but the water, but filled with adrenaline, my mouth was torn wide open to release the raging howl that had been churning in my chest for years. The sound belted across the lake, eventually sputtering down to throaty barks,  then soft yipping on into deafening silence.

Heaving, I turned, refreshed, to a forest before me, gnarled and black as pitch but inviting and endless. But before my foot hit the ground upon my first step toward adventure, I heard something call at my back, barely an echo to the blood pounding in my ears. I froze and waited. There again- a braying snipped bark, unmistakably equine yet strangely canine. I turned to scan the rest of the cliff’s edge trailing south along the edge of the black forest and -there! Not a mile away, stood a man wrapped in flannels atop a proud zebra, watching me with warmly lifted brows and half a smile.

I waited for a moment, looking down at my tattered and wasted clothing, soaked with blood and sweat, barely hanging from my shoulders and hips. I looked up again to meet his gaze and he turned his head slightly, questioningly, teasingly. A laugh bubbled up my throat as I turned toward the pair to walk along the edge of the forest and the snapping white lake to see what kinds of companions this man and his zebra would make.