~sassgoddess
She came with the spring.
Like a fairy riding the spring breeze, gently she placed herself amongst us. She's tiny, almost miniscule, but that didn't make her presence any less significant in that vast farm. Her blonde hair fluttered with every move she made, and she always giggled like she knew something you didn't. Her big blue eyes sparkled like the sky she always made her way through—she always ran lightly, as if she was floating.
Her cheeks flushed pink from excitement like the pink toy flowers. She looked at every single one of us and spoke her name with child-like clarity. I'm Claire. And I'll be starting a new beginning in this town.
She was bright as the summer sky.
She would come down to town almost every day, bringing small gift for everyone. She always knew what everybody liked and when everybody's birthday was. I asked her how she did it, but she just winked at me and whispered that it's a secret.
She made the farm alive again. Crops were planted, animals were taken care of. Sometimes she would bring her pet dog to the beach and played Frisbee with it, laughing and rolling on the white sand. Everybody loved looking at her, radiating energy like a little duplicate of sun, our own personal sun. A small fragment of sun on Earth that sometimes was too bright for me to look at properly.
Sometimes she could be calming, like autumn.
She could spend hours sitting by the port fishing, or just looking at the ocean, as if she was trying to keep the ocean's blueness in her eyes. She would listen to everybody's stories without interrupting, nodding and showing her sympathy, offering help in any way she could. She would go to the church and confessed, or just sat there, her gaze piercing through the stained glass.
Her lips would be pursed mysteriously, as if she had existed much, much longer than we all had. She would go to Mother's Hill and sat at the peak, praying to another God we didn't know existed, asking for something we didn't know mattered.
It was winter when she was gone.
I remembered it vividly. Every single person in town was there for her, including me. Sobbing and crying buzzed my ears. I remembered it cruelly, the sight of her lifeless body inside the casket, her pale, fragile body. A pair of closed eyes. A head void of hair. Lips pursed together, but not in a smile I've always loved. She wasn't flying anymore.
She never told anyone. Things were awfully wrong, but she never let us know. She wasn't a fairy—she was a mortal, just like us, much to our late realization. Death had claimed her, and we stood there under the snow, like regrets falling gently on our souls, slowly being consumed.
I put down the pink toy flowers she loved on her grave, next to a bunch of other flowers. Next to me, a dog snuggled to my legs, sniffing the grave with human-like solemnity. I put my hands together and prayed like how she taught me.
Then I left for the farm, once again an abandoned place, just so I could imagine her soaring through the cloudless sky, shining for us again…
It was spring once again.