It takes less than thirty seconds to shoot into the air and hover above the city. The snow-covered rooves glint in the light of the dying sun, softening the city's edges. In your periphery, rainbows sprout around the frozen droplets in the atmosphere. You gasp the faster the light ends, the beauty both growing and fading. When you two get to the top, for just a few seconds, only a few, it feels as if your wrist is freed from his grip.
Gravity grabs you and you feel yourself plummeting, the wind rushing around you. It dives into your throat, taking your breath and your ability to scream in terror and delight. Your mouth opens wide, but no sound comes out. Instinctively, you bend your knees slightly, make your arms parallel to your shoulder blades, and your hands grope for something at your shoulders, something missing. You can't think of what it is, the missing familiar weight, only meeting the darkness and hurt again.
Jack, under your falling form, catches you and slides his free arm around your waist. You cling to his neck, earning a squeeze on your side in response. Looking down at your face, messy strands of hair framing your head, he gives you an apologetic expression as you two slow in the air, rising once more.
"Please," you say, your voice quavering from the exhilaration, "don't do that again. Ever." At least, not without due notice. The ground was far too close for that fall to begin with.
He smirks in reply. Glancing back to the ground, you point out a quaint little house not too far from the orphanage. You direct Jack to it, starting, "If you could drop me off here…"
He gives you a suspicious, confused look. He asks, "You live here?"
It is dark red with a black-shingled roof, two stories tall. A snowman sits on the front lawn, halfway hiding behind a brown picket fence. Toys are strewn about the porch. You hesitate a second longer than you should have, Jack noticing. Quietly, you answer, "Yes…?"
"No, Snowflake, it isn't," he retorts. "This home belongs to my first believers, Jamie and Sophie Bennett." So they are real.
Sheepish, you give a small laugh, unable to meet his face. "Can't you just drop me off here?"
"And then where would I find you if I wanted to meet you again?"
"Back at the clearing."
"Nice try, but no."
"Please?"
"Snowflake."
Sighing, you concede, directing him to Lady Jay's Halfway Home for Teenage Girls. The brown building is three stories tall, the windows dark and blacked out by curtains. Snow piles up in the eaves of the roof and the back yard. In the minute it takes the two of you to reach your destination, you can't look at him. You've been to so many different houses and orphanages over the years and you've become so tired of everyone asking you the same questions you never have the answers to. People are only curious about the circumstance of becoming an orphan, not the orphan herself. You stopped letting people know much about you. You became tired of people taking pity on you just because you have no real family to belong to. No one wanted you to be part of their "real" family anyway.
At Lady Jay's Halfway Home for Teenage Girls, Jack slows, curious as to why he is curious, mainly, and curious about you. Curious as to why you will not look at him. Asking again, he questions, "You live here?"
Turning in his arms to the building, you mutter, "Yes."
He sets you down at the porch before stepping down on the wood, the boards creaking slightly under your combined weight. Removing his arm from around your waist, you step back further under the porch's awning. "Thanks for the ride, Jack." You turn, hand resting on the doorknob. You don't say "goodbye" because you hate those two syllables, hate the pain of leaving behind someone you gained a smidgen of closeness to. You don't know what the next day will bring, whether it be a transfer to another orphanage or to a foster home. Besides, after people find out you live here, they don't tend to stick around.
"Snowflake, wait."
You turn, figuring this may be the last time you see him. He backed away and is in the air above the ice-tipped wrought iron gate. "When can I see you again?"
Again? "Tomorrow," you decide, knowing if you have to leave the next day, you can at least stay one last morning. "Same place as today." He nods once and zooms off, leaving flurries of snow in his wake.
After dinner passes, you are awake that night, staring out the window of the room you share with four other girls your age. You haven't caught their names yet and they don't seem to care, all of them asleep. They rest on the beds farthest away from the coldest place in the room: the wall with the windows. Your bed is right at the window, the Man in the Moon casting bright rays down on you. A small figure bringing white behind it darts across the sky. Probably Jack.
Around ten this night, golden sand drifts through the cracks in the wooden frame of the window: dreamsand. Reaching up, your hand grazes the fringes of the stream, making some of the sand sift into life. At your touch, unlike Jack's dolphins, the sands shift into a boney horse, its eyes molten gold. It gallops around the room before bursting apart. When all the sand dissipates over your roommates, you exhale and turn back to the moon. Instead of finding its fullness, you find a small, portly, golden man watching you. He creates a hat with the twist of his hand and tips it to you, probably wondering if you can actually see him.
Sanderson Mansnoozie, you think. He doesn't look as solid as the movie made him to be, the sand swirling and shifting his features as if he were Van Gogh's stars in motion. Out loud, you say, "Hi, Sandy."
Puzzled for only a second at your reaction, given that he has never met you face-to-face before tonight, he smiles as you open the window to him. The wind breezes through at the opening, causing you to curl your blanket around your shoulders. His tiny feet step onto the sill, the images over his head gesturing a question of you sleeping.
"Too many thoughts about today," you admit, figuring he asked why you were awake. "Too many thoughts about the future too." He gives you a soft smile, gesturing for you to lie down. Bringing his hands together, he silently claps, a ball of dreamsand dissipating over your forehead. The dream sends you flying on your own with an unexpected familiar few. Sadly though, darkness starts to encroach.
Hello, again. I'm sorry this took so long; I'm getting used to college and my laptop was actually dead for a month or so. It wouldn't charge, hold a charge, or even come to life on the charger.
-Z