Marlowe Maddon Medicci

Marlowe Maddon Medicci: firefighter, self-exile and now-homeless twentysomething in a pickup truck. With him, his only companion remaining from Iowa, Elena the Pyrenees mix; she took up most of the passenger front. He cruised down the interstate with pop tunes blaring, half-listening to Lady Gaga's Born This Way. Carefully wrapped up beneath Elena's feet, his bought-and-cherished fire ax, used for everything from emergencies to cutting wood. With only the clothes on his back and whatever was in the truck, the farmboy was headed for Atlanta, and for whatever fortune he could find.

His story began simply enough: he was born to an Italian family in Jersey, deeply Catholic and full of criticism. The only child in a (rather conservative) family, from childhood, he knew he was "different". Though his mind barely acknowledged it in that day and age, Marlowe's gender identity was far from "the norm". He and his mother and father fought, and they fought with his aunts and uncles, who fought with Marlowe, who all agreed Marlowe needed "help from the Lord" to "cure his condition". The verbal and emotional abuse piled on itself, and yes, Marlowe was struck once or twice by his father. Marlowe had struck first, however, in a fit of preteen, and then teenage, anger and frustration; self-defence could be assumed. Turning onto the next exit turned him away from such thoughts.

Iowa had been a dream. He'd been homeless at seventeen, having finally lost it when his mother threw her antique crystal at his head. She had been drunk, outrageously so after a long day; that wine was for her and Mr. Medicci's anniversary. Or was it Marlowe who threw the crystal, only to have it thrown back? Adrenaline made the memories hazy. Mrs. Medicci had screamed at him in Italian to "get the **** out", and he did, with a single duffel bag to his name. He was homeless for three weeks, living out of a shelter, when Uncle Murray Medicci had come to get him. Despite being Mr. Medicci's brother, Murray was far more and gentle, and saw Marlowe not as an abomination against God's will. The Jersey-born boy was soon on a bus to Iowa, in the middle of corn country and a sleepy town nobody knew.

Marlowe looked with spectacled eyes forward, grinning broadly as Murray pulled into the tiny town of Lann. Lann was one of those towns you'd never find on a map, but was still important enough to warrant a small police force and fire department. There, Murray was chief, and made good money fighting fires in the bush. Marlowe had full-blown hero worship for his uncle; the man had swooped in when all was lost, the only understanding Medicci, and whisked Marlowe away to Paradise. Since Marlowe had turned eighteen during those three weeks loose, he was no longer bound to his family, and free to settle as he pleased. (WIP)

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