She's running, a star in the dank, misty park. Swathed in a knitted rainbow sweater and polka dot rain boots. A bright yellow skirt and chunky glass blue jewelry. She chooses carefully where to step, and lies down on the grass.
I've never seen her before, all the days I have come to the park, I have never spotted this girl who takes odd walks, poking around in the flowers and lying in their elevated beds. Who sings along with birds, and studies the sky like a treasured jewel.
I look over to my mother, who is typing away on her cobalt inspirion laptop. She doesn't notice me, and brushes a mousy strand of brown hair back into her loose ponytail. I groan, and start to watch the girl again.
She has run to a young child, chubby and soft skinned. She coos over it, twirling her thin fingers through the baby's hair. I watch, as she smiles at the mother, lighting up everyone's face and dashing away again to whisper things to the flowers.
Instead, she nears me. For the first time I can tell she's a bit nervous, twitching her eyes and losing the sparks from her whole appearance. I wave, and she leaps towards me.
“Hi!” She sputters, clattering down next to me. She's only got to be six or seven, with such a little frame, and a tiny collar of baby fat hangs around her legs, holding her up so she can walk correctly. Only six. She's only six.
“Hello.” I say a little expressionlessly. She raises an eyebrow, and pulls at the hem of her sweater, unraveling a craggy string of blue. Putting it in her skirt pocket, she tugs at my hair, and asks if she can braid it for me.
“Can I?” She questions, her eyes shining in the gray light. I nod uneasily, and she gently yanks my dark hair into three parts, layering and brushing.
“I'm Neveah Fay.” She giggles, mushing my hair onto another chunk. “Who are you?”
“Kapri.” I say, turning around as she finishes the braid. It falls down my back, glossy and smooth. “Isanhamn. I live around here.”
“I don't.” Neveah answers, “I live in a different place, with my mom and dad and my pet fish. His name is Spike.”
“Oh, cool.” I lie. I hate fish, all day they swim with glittering tails, lazily snapping at food tablets. Of course, there’s no reason to disappoint her and yell out how much they annoy me.
Neveah edges closer, playing around with a metal clasp on her boot. “Can I tell you something, that I don't want anybody else to know Kapri? I want you to know because maybe you can help me with it. Maybe, so can I tell you?”
“Uh, sure.” I nod, and brush a stray leaf of my jeans. The rough fabric squeezes me, making red marks at my hip. Neveah stands up, and leads me to a bushy floral garden, covered in satiny azaleas and forget me nots.
“Do you know what the Indigo Children are?” She asks, plopping us down on two short tree stumps. The cool, slender wood bites at me, curling around my body.
“Yes, they were on T.V.'' I say, hovering a glance at my mother. She bites her lip, still immersed in the screen and clicking at random times. “There was a whole show about those kids, who were telepathic and could do all sorts of weird things.”
“I'm one.” She states, looking nervously around the flowers and digging her fingers into the fabric of her sweater, the string fraying and billowing. “I need you to listen to me.”
I don't quite believe her, but it's hard to ignore how serious she is. I haven't ever seen someone so young in this type of mood. Boxy, shallow, and wanting a friend.
I lived weightlessly, she says. Inside of my head, she's gone telepathic and proving that she is telling full truth.
There were at least a million of us, all small, compact things wanting to be real instead of just in a dark area of the universe. Then one day something announced we would be going to study Earth, a little expedition. I got to go, and study. For at least four years now, I've been here. They tricked us, because they wanted space all to themselves, so they mashed us in. You guys called us the Indigo Children, Star Kids, Crystal Children. Most of us died in the beginning. Now it's only me and I want you to help me get back to where I belong.
“Can you?”
There is a long silence before I turn a shake and close my eyes. “No.” I don't want to leave my life; this girl can stay where she needs to right on Earth.
“If you were born as a thing in space, then how do you have regular parents?” I challenge, “You can just keep living with them.”
“When I came here, they extracted growing children from the womb and replaced them with us. So my parent’s think I'm theirs, I'm not though.”
“What are you then?”
“I'm a soul, who's supposed to float the worlds, I have to travel and live my life. And, I suppose at one point I am supposed to save your world from dying out because that's what the Indigo Children are supposed to do and be. I can't do that though, if you don't help me.”
Help me.
Please.
I want to go back.
Her words begin to crawl through me, swirling until I want to cover my hands and scream . I look at her eyes, twinkling violet and gray. I've never seen purple eyes, they're so...meaningful.
“You won't get hurt.”
“Yes I will. We'll be trying to get you back to some imaginary place in space that doesn't have stars or any life whatsoever.”
I promisssssssssssssse.
She holds my hand, hers soft and full of emotion. Something stirs inside of me, and I can see Neveah, dancing in a dark air. Singing a song nobody knows and creating auras with twirls of her fingers. She's so happy, and I barely know her.
“I won't get hurt?”
Never.
“I'll go.”
Neveah Fay
You agree
to my rules,
my way that will guard
us to my place
of life.
I will let you
return with me,
and become a sister,
a princess.
We will
glide across
the starry night,
flow into the hands,
if my darkened galaxy
where I belong.
If they let me stay...
ⱷChapter Twoⱷ
Threads of gold begin to streak the sapphire, autumn sky, striking the clouds with golden fire and illuminating a crescent of silvery moon. I have long gone left the park, still unsure that Neveah is even real. She may be a dream, a fragment of unreality.
My mom sits at the couch, her laptop propped up on the scratched glass coffee table with sun hitting her hair, making her reflection shine even brighter. She clicks away, still obsessive over her chat sight. I leave, and walk up to my room to wait for dinner. The door creaks open, and I drop on my bed, listening to the heavy gale wind blowing the leaves around outside. Time feels unreal, slow and syrupy around my body, while with everybody else it ticks away as if there is not even enough of it.
I crank on the soundtrack to Once, the homemade movie that became so popular, and strain to hear Marketa Irglova's voice, soft as she sings the lyrics to The Hill against the piano chiming in the background. I cannot help, but try to copy her voice and melt into the song,
Walking, up the hill tonight,
and you have closed your eyes.
Wish I, didn't have to make
all those mistakes,
and be wise...
“Your voice is beautiful.” I dart over to the window, where a muddled sound is coming from. Neveah. She IS real, not imaginative, but a standing human being. Well, not a human. An Indigo Child.
I nod, blushing a little, and then crack the window open all the way, knocking out the iron screen so she can crawl in. Her tiny body squeezes through, drifting on the white curtains, and she sits down on my bed.
“You left the park without asking me.” She says edgily, looking down at her fresh pair of blue and green nylon shorts, and rainbow strawberry socks. “I had to track your aura to find you.”
“Aura?” I ask, glancing at the door. It's safe, but I talk quietly in case my mom comes upstairs, to see some unfamiliar girl sitting on my bed in unnaturally bright colors.
“An aura is this almost invisible light that surrounds you, it tells what you're like, your moods, and sometimes they have different colors. Yours is very bright. Violet and silver, but it's rather small. Anyway, some of us can find patterns of it to track others, so I followed you to your house and waited here.”
I raise an eyebrow, and look at Neveah. Her eyes have changed color, and now she bears turquoise blue irises, lighter than the tropic sea. She smiles, accentuating the bright colors surrounding her even more than usual.
“So, is that still true, I'm still uh, going?” I whisper, concentrating on a fraying swirl of green thread, teetering on the hem of my olive halter one of the stupid fashionista girls at my school insisted for me to wear. “It'll match your eyes. The call hazel, noisette is French. So, sweet. Sounds like a type of shortbread cookie, try it on.”
Neveah snorts, and pinches my shoulder with tiny, slender fingers. “Course you are. You promised that for me.”
“I did?” My stomach starts to squirm, wanting to churn and make me faint.
She nods. “Yup, You sweared on it, just not out loud. But you thought it. So you're going. I just need about three days, to get ready.”
Take as long as you want. I think, as she starts to climb out the window again. The sky has darkened a little, and the golden light has shafted to a block of angry rose madder, shining just below the darkened navy. The trees have become silhouettes, shimmering splotches of black amidst the outlined, boxy houses. “Why did you want me to go with you Neveah?” I ask, suddenly full of questions. She undoes herself, and reenters the room.
“When I saw you in the park,” She starts, and her young voice begins to sound so much wiser. Because it knows more, than all of us. “I knew you were special. Sitting there, understanding everything as everything passed around you. I had to have you take me back to my blank universe. You made me realize how much I miss it there.”
“But it's so blank there, when you describe it.”
“It is Kapri.” Neveah tremors, ducking under the window. “But nobody loves me here. Sometimes, you have to be lonely in order to be where you really belong.”
I can't say anything, she's already gone.
Neveah Fay
W U A S
I P T
S O A
H N R
When you think you've lost it all,
look up and you'll find their light.
ⱷChapter Threeⱷ
“Kapri?”
I strain to hear Mom's voice against the heavy sound of Falling Slowly. A drift of lemon scent wafts up to my room, and I dash downstairs. My mom is waiting at the stairs, cleaned and wearing a crisp white cooking apron.
“Is dinner ready?” I ask, catching my breath while I rest on the furry, carpeted stairs. She nods, and claps her hands together. I look down, and brush hair out of my line of vision.
“Lemon garlic chicken and those russet potatoes I picked up. Roasted.”
“Mm.”
I follow my mom into the dinner table, planted neatly between a peach colored wall, tacked with sunny pictures of my childhood, and the opening to the kitchen. Through the window, the dark, misty blue of twilight begins to peek through the blockade of last warmth. A handful of stars pocket through the threads of dark, just barely there.
“Ready to eat?” My mom asks, watching me stare at the sky. “Later we can go outside and stargaze if you want to honey.”
“Okay.” I say, almost mopey. I have not talked to my mom in a while, for this long. We more or less, grew apart a bit. It may be nice though, to sit on the craggy porch, tucked in a blanket and under a scattered sweep of stars. Maybe.
I collapse onto the chair, and recline, feeling the soft cushion of suede fabric, traced along the cold, hard cherry wood. In front of me, clatters a porcelain blue plate painted with tiny purple violets and dashed with Celtic knots, filled with a portion of food. I pick up a fork, cool and slim with dark argent metal, and stab a piece of chicken. A squirt of clear, yellow juice falls on the plate in perfect drops.
“Looks good Mom.” I say, shoveling a rugged piece of tender flesh into my mouth. She smiles, and begins with her potatoes; dropping them past she tightly pressed together lips. “Thank you sweetie.” She chuckles, chewing the crispy skins of the russet potatoes.
I finish the chicken, and let the rolling juices pour down the sink. The plate is all done, and I put it under the faucet to be washed. My mom follows me, with her sad, hollow eyes staring at me. So amazed, at how old I am.
“Do you want to go outside Kapri?” She asks, removing her apron.
I look outside, flat black with thousands of white pockets, stars dazzling everywhere. Everything is perfectly visible. Fluttering my eyelids, I look up.
“Maybe tomorrow.” I say.
| | |
Neveah stares into space, the black drizzled with blues and red, and navy disappearing behind her. I breathe its nothingness. All lonely and shaded. The wind whistles, and I feel something behind me. Some kind of lonesome soul.
“Where are we Neveah?” I ask, swirling a column of dust past my feet. A shadow of gray sweeps past her face, removing her colors and cheer`. Now I can picture why she loves to wear things bright. It's so drab here; she must want to forget all the bland of this place.
It's suddenly familiar, as Neveah blows a kiss through her tiny fingers, billowing the wind in a new direction. I look in her eyes, turning to stone, iron gray.
“The blank universe.”
“It's so horrible.”
“It's my home.”
| | |
I wake up, shivering even in the foggy early fall light. My eyes start to focus, and the room becomes less groggy. I can see, the off white curtains floating in the fresh blue sky, and flapping on my face. The sky looks picturesque, painted with sunny streaks, and drifts of snowy clouds. I swallow, tasting warm sun in my mouth. A fresh day.
My dream still hangs over me like a weighted ghost. Neveah would want to live in such a terrible place. But it's her choice, so I have to accept, and however we get there, I'll have to help her return. Because I sweared. In my mind.
I toss aside heavy covers, and open my drawer, immediately speculating on a stark, purple shirt made of stretchy fabric. It looks perfectly new, free of stains or wrinkles. I raise an eyebrow, and pick it up to see what it is for.
A tiny white card falls out of the short sleeve, blank on one side and on the other filled with strings of spidery black writing. I squint, but the words don't make sense until something begins to play them in my head.
Here you go Kapri.
This is for you,
because I like to be safe,
and bright colors do that.
I put the shirt on, and turn to a new section of the paper. The writing is taller, looped and sad. The letters look as if they were knifed into the paper, to be harsh and deathly.
Take me to my universe,
it is where I belong,
find me my own
colony,
to hum my favorite song.
Churn within
the stars, as we fly away,
together we will sing,
and start a brand new day.
It's from Neveah, a song and clothing. I will wear the shirt, purple to show that inside of darkness, I will find light. I will sing the song, because it is mine, and I've only known it now, but it seems to be my whole entire life.
Neveah Fay
Running free and
Running faster than ever.
Becoming the lightning
Reaching up and finding
You are there to help me search,
To find my destiny.
ⱷChapter Fourⱷ
Remembering, that it is summer, I slip on a worn, brown pair of sandals and trudge outside into the bright, sunny air, feeling the warmish light dash on my feet. The sun streaks my legs, burning them tan and creamy golden. The door swings open, and a weary eyed picturesque figure of my mom calls to me.
“Be back for breakfast.” She says, her voice still hanging onto the sad drops of depression. Then, she disappears back inside and shuts the door with a soft click.
I walk slowly, immersed in a thick serum that drowns me out, from everything. I feel like this must be how Neveah thinks of things, too fast and strong for her. The girl, who should be all alone. In one, blank universe. Neveah must be doing something to me, to make me think this way and feel so apart from everything.
She’s changed me.
I shake my head, and bite my lip. Continuing to walk, I start down to the field. It’s close, a half mile away from my house and shaded by a grove of white linden trees. I have never, seen anyone there so it will give me time to think about everything.
I pad quickly, past the white Victorian houses surrounding the short, cropped road quilted with deep potholes and sprouts of grass sticking up through the cracks. It’s older, than most of the other streets in our town, so they made it a back road and closed it off to anybody but the people who lived on it, like my mom and I.
Just mom and I. There was never my dad, or much of him. He divorced from my mom when I was six, but I still had memories of him. Scooping me up at two in the morning to watch meteor showers, and fixing me little figures out of scrimpy, dead branches. He was like a god to me, so unimaginably amazing. Just not to my mom. But we were two different people. I was the one, which he could understand better. His fuse ended, with my mom. That was that, and there was only two. A duo, after that.
I take heavy steps as I enter the dark, iron gray entrance to the woods of linden trees. They’re at the very end of the road, waiting for someone to enter their realm of thick brush. I smile, tracing the white, heavy bark and ready to go in.
I cautiously dart looks past the comfort of town, and run through a stretch of sparse, growing trees packed at the base with dead, brown and gold leaves. I pick one up, feeling the dry veins in my hands. Old, and spindly from last fall.
The woods begin to widen up, and I am brought, to the base of the field. But, it’s not like regular. Instead it has bloomed over in thousands of small, springy flowers the color of fiery gold. I breathe in, letting the smell run through me. It’s sugary, but a bit intoxicating after a while. I stand there, arms outstretched and waiting for the moment where I am fully gone out. Unexplainable, really. It’s a feeling that overtakes your body, leaving your soul to float higher. Your body, too big to come with it. Gone out.
“It’s for you.”
I return back, snapping out of the firm posture of my joy. Neveah stands in front of me, petite in her blue clad vest and day glow, yellow shirt. I smile, and drop my hands, slapping them on the cold, stretchy material of my shirt.
“The flowers?” I ask, looking out at the rows of endless light. She nods, shielding her eyes. I wipe my hands on my shorts, excess mud slipping to the golden ground.
“It’s your favorite color. I made them last night, and then waited.”
I stare into the field, the vast gold molding into one block of color, forever bright and shining like a sunset. The only sunset to stay forever, even when we know it’s time to say goodbye to it. Neveah sits down, and holds my hand. For some reason, I need it. To be understood better than everyone else.
“Thank you.”
| | |
I don’t go home for breakfast yet, but watch the sun shatter into the sky, in a rosy pink light. Neveah braids my hair again, coaxing it into curly down across my back. I simply sit there, waiting for my words to come out.
“When are we, going?” I ask nervously, “to the blank universe?”
“Soon. First I need to do a few things here on Earth that I can’t do there.” She replies, looping a strand of hair through another. “Y’know, fulfill some things I think I was sent to do.”
I keep quiet, listening to the wind rush through the heat of the day, it’s been such a long time, and I think I can ask Neveah what I was waiting to. My question, that’s clinging to me and wanting to come out of me in a question.
“Am I?”
Neveah taps her fingers, pushing her index finger in the space between her thumb and itself. She exasperates, biting her lip.
“Sort of. You’re in a state of being one of me, and simply finding yourself out. You don’t know, what’s going to come for you, but you just woke up to the real world. That’s another reason, I picked you to come with me when I’m ready. Because you’re like me in a way.”
Like Neveah.
Suddenly, she’s wiping tears from her face. I squeeze her hand. “What’s wrong?”
“I want to be home. In my world.”
“Then we’ll go.”
She snorts, and brushes her cheeks off, laughing a little. “Silly. We can’t go yet, we still have to do some things, so I can make you a full Indigo Child, and I get to find myself better. We have about, I’ll give us a week or two, or three to find ourselves.”
“A week, eh?”
“Yup.”
She clasps my hand, and twirls me. Clumsily, I fall over, but then stand back up. She spins, gracefully bouncing on her toes for minutes and hours. It’s a dance, for everything to blow away in a field of hope, and a mind of dreams shattering away to live among stars.
Neveah Fay
Every day….I am in a state of wonder. Things rush past, and when I slow down they speed up. I never fit in, never had friends or really connected. But they all wanted to be like me, loved my style. Loved my attitude. They had desire for me. It didn’t matter, I wouldn’t accept.
There was only one person, who I wanted to travel with me and find themselves, while I found myself. That was Kapri. The girl, with hazel eyes and a swirl of curly, unruly dirty blond hair. Who looked farther, past the expectations and studied the sky. The girl, all too much like me.
The girl, who almost was me.
ⱷChapter Fiveⱷ
The field of gold turns a swarming auburn as the sun begins to dip through a veil of pale blue. Neveah sighs, and clasps her hands in her lap. I look at her, closed eyes and her head tilted slightly towards the sun. She’s the happiest I’ve ever seen her.
“I’m gonna go home soon.” I say, smiling. Neveah nods, not bothering to open her eyes, “Come get me when you have a plan for something to do tomorrow.”
“Okay. Goodbye.” She whispers, loosening her grip on my hand she’s been holding. I pat her head, and brush my legs off from crunched petals of golden flowers. After this, I pad across the sun stained field and to the forest to go back home.
The flora twisting around the dry leaves of the forest snags at my jeans, scratching my legs and pulling me back. I unclasp a snaking branch of vine, throwing past me in a rush. The bright sky casts shadows on the trees, darkening the whole forest and making it hard to see without squinting in the destined direction.
I clash through the linden trees, arriving on the brim of our slate gray road. My neighbor-Alisa- walks out from her yard. She goes to my school and is a year older than me. Prettier, and more popular. She bares glossy, chestnut hair, and smooth matte skin. A perfect structure. Almost intimidating to look at somebody, when they’re obviously better than you.
She rolls her eyes, at my torn jeans and frizzy hair engorged with golden flower petals. “Nice shirt cuh-pree.”
“Kah-pree, actually.”
She snickers, and walks around to her back yard, her shiny, black sandals clicking on the green, even grass. I bite my lip, staring at the ground.
Suddenly, Neveah’s voice is in my head, whispering, To be one, you must fully become yourself when in a tangle of disorder. Be stronger.
“Hey, jerk!” I call out, almost regretting it. Alisa turns on her shoes, bouncing up as she does it. Her pinched smile has turned into a smudge of hate, down casting in an evil, twitching smirk. “Okay Kapri, I don’t think we use that when we talk to uh, me.”
“Really?” I challenge, “Well I think I’m going to when I see an idiot.” She bobs her head, twisting her mouth even more into a sly annoyance, that she has been dissed. Walking to her back yard, I trot home, raising my head slightly higher.
“Thank you Neveah.” I say quietly.
I get home slightly before the sky ripens into a splash of darkness. My mom is at the door, waiting for me with a scowl.
“I told you to be back for breakfast Kapri, and you come, at seven? Listen when I tell you something.” She grumbles, edging towards a yell. I nod, and start to walk inside.
“Kapri?” She merges, “I’m not kidding! Listen!”
I nod again, and walk up the stairs to change into clean clothes. My mom stops me, inspecting my jeans and fraying shirt. “Where were you?”
I teeter on my step a little, and say, “At the field.”
My mom awkwardly sits down, on the ground. Rocking back and forth, seeping into a drowning river of pain. “I told you never to go to the field again. Never. And you-you, went anyway? You know how I feel about that place.”
“I’m sorry.”
It was a warm, bright day with an open, sea blue sky of drifting clouds and whistling wind tucked into the blossoms of the linden trees. Mom, Dad and I all tucked lunch into a small, traditional straw basket and brought a large tablecloth to all eat on. A picnic, in the field. On spring’s third, opening week.
After my stomach was full of a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich, I disappeared into a cluster of craggy, old apple trees and began to climb. I left Mom and Dad alone, to marvel at the beautiful nature of the day.
I crept back, towards our picnic fortress to see them fighting. Mom was puffy, and red eyed. Crying. It threw a stake into my heart, twisting and killing all my thoughts of how my parents loved each other. I heard a little of their fight,
“What the hell is your problem Nyvette?”
“Please don’t make this hard Jeff; I just want to have a nice day.”
“Well I don’t. And I definitely don’t want to have it any more.”
“Sweetie please don’t say that.”
“No, no more sweetie. I’m leaving you, and I’m not coming back.”
That was when I stepped forth. Mom covered her mouth, gasping and choking on air. I asked her, what was going on. She stepped away from my Dad, and answered,
“Dad and I don’t love each other anymore.”
“Never?”
Mom’s breath was still quivering as she spoke to me, glancing back at my Dad.