It was a still night. Not a single leaf on the trees of Upper Flagley stirred. The heat seemed to have settled like a blanket over the sleeping houses, muffling all sounds and seeming to slow down time itself. The only sure sign that this town was not just a painting was the clouds, drifting lazily across the blue-black sky. The moon cast a cool glow across the window of one particular home. The light filtered through the glass and pooled on the pillow of a young child, causing her mousy hair to take on a darker shade of brown. Her eyes shifted beneath their lids, she was dreaming. Her dream contained only flashes and glimpses of things. Incoherent bits of information swirled in her mind. For a moment she saw a spilled glass of water or a small boy with golden locks of hair running down a street. Then there was a group of people gathered around a table discussing something in words that seemed to burble out of their mouth, with no meaning attatched to them. A balloon drifted into the sky in the next image, then it was replaced by dark hooded figures slipping into the shadows of an alley. A sharp pain shot through her head and the girl twitched and awoke. Another migraine, she thought as she rubbed her pulsing temples. She got these headaches frequently and she learned not to think much of them. When she was very young they had bothered her quite a lot and she would cry for hours on end as her mother tried every remedy in the book to try and make them go away. A visit to a hospital several years back had informed the small girl and her worried parents that there was not much that could be done. The child would just have to learn to wait them out.
She kicked the sheets off herself, as it was a very hot early July night, and turned on her stomach to face the clock that sat neatly on the corner of her nightstand. The face read three in the morning. Her mood immediatly brightened; she had been eleven for three hours now. Rolling out of bed, she rushed to the mirror to look at herself. To her disappointment, not much had changed. For some reason or another, she was hoping that there would be a significant difference from her ten year old self. Something more dignified in her stance, or an extra ounce of beauty in her features. What she really had been wishing for was an extra inch or two to her height. Alas, she had no such luck. She remained the small, skinny girl she'd always been. With freckles up her arms, and her hair never managing to grow past her shoulders without becoming thin and stringy. With a sigh, she climbed back into her bed. Presents awaited her in the morning, so she was too excited to fall asleep right away. Would she get that set of paints she had wanted for so long? Filled with thoughts of what gifts she would recieve and what kind of cake she would eat, she slowly drifted back to sleep.
