Once there was a child who loved her best friend the most that any six-year-old heart could love. They were inseparable, really, they told everyone they were twins. Although it would have been hard to believe, the one so skinny and sickly, blonde and blue-eyed, the other healthy and strong, dark wavy pony-tail and big brown eyes.
When they started school, the child was put into the next grade after two days, because her father had taught her to read when she was four. She couldn't understand why she was being punished. Her best friend was drawn into the first grade group of girls while she was lost among the older second grade kids, who treated her like the freak they saw her as, the teachers skivvy, being used to read whole books aloud to the class while the teacher graded their notebooks at the desk.
Sometimes she saw her friend at recess, and they could sit together and eat their lunch, but one day she came out late to the playground, to find her friend part of a larger circle of girls, all sitting cross-legged on the ground. When she went to sit next to her friend, they all scooched up close, knees touching one another so that there was no room for her. She heard their sniggering as she moved away.
Such deep cutting striations children suffer, the cruelty of others. Years later, the grown-up can go back instantly to that day, to herself as a child. She knew the saying "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me!" was a load of codswallop, but it was something to strive for, and that was probably its point. Character-building, if you can steer past all that hurt, absorb it, let it flow slowly out.
I found another quick drawing I did of the model Myra.
In Campagny (continued)
Luca stood a while and let the feeling wash over and through him. His eyes stung. He felt in his pocket for his drawing of her. He did not take it out, just felt it, knew it, remembered her.
Then they went on, the little green bird and the tall and bony young man. He told Beeze she could sit on his shoulder if she liked, but she chose to stand on his head, clutching his curls with her delicate claws, giving him directions every now and then. She told him she would take him to First Town, where he could begin looking for Norena.
They were in a forest now, with a dappled floor of mulchy leaves, as after rain. Luca preferred the shadows, felt more at ease in the gloom, although he had never seen such trees, thick trunks, so tall and branched that he couldn't see the tops of them.
And out of the corner of his eye, glimpses of large grey shapes now and then, although he couldn't be sure, but the thought of forest monsters scared him a little, although Beeze seemed unperturbed.
They rounded a place of rock and undergrowth, coming face to face with an enormous grey animal, possessed of a long kind of arm at the end of its face, giant teeth jutting out from either side, and huge flaps on each side of its head. A Forest-Monster! Luca stopped dead.
But Beeze flew up to perch on the central arm and chatted cordially to the strange creature in an odd language, which seemed to be very quiet and consisted mostly of waiting, so that Luca found that he could barely hear them.
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