Chapter 6
Heaven Is Waiting
Age: Sixteen Years, Five Months
Fay walks through the woods nearing her house, her boots leaving divots in the fresh snow behind, her breath creating a cloud of white before her. She wears black pants and jacket over many layers of other clothes, trying to stay warm in the cooling weather. On her right shoulder rests three planks of wood, all around two meters long and covered in different shades of chipping paint.
Her shoulder throbs from the weight but not as much as it did when she first started gathering things from Fork's dump, taking things people didn't want or would notice missing. It kind of grossed her out in the first week but when she got past the smell and saw all the things she could reuse, she found it quite enjoyable.
Fay would leave first thing in the morning, collect things from the pile of useful things she kept just away from dump, be back by mid-day then take care of things around the house. The planks of wood she collected went to the porch and outside stairs. She couldn't replace the missing windows but covered them with strong plastic that had once been the town pool covering, that had been replaced just days before the first snow for the year hit. She had plans to chip off all the old outdoor paint as soon as spring arrived and use the mounds of paints she had collected to bring bright and bold strikes of life into the forest, like the forest had brought into her.
Fay felt better every day, somehow freer too. She could go days without thinking of the people she once knew. The nights came and went with such ease now, she had almost gone two weeks without a nightmare, and even then, they didn't have the same effect on her as they once did – they didn't feel as real anymore.
Fay follows her normal shortcut to the narrowest part of the river that separated Forks from La Push. She tosses the wood over one by one then jumps across the ice water, landing on her feet with a poof of snow. She stacks the planks on her left shoulder for the last part of the walk, all while humming away to a song she can't remember the words to anymore. She does that a lot now, just to somehow release the joy that builds inside her everyday – like one of the many surrounding birds that tweets away in the treetops.
She feels like a normal woman now; she looks like it too. Her hair now flows to her mid back; her skin is now blemish less - a few shrinking scars but not one bruise or cut - her eyes shine brightly even on the darkest day. And she finally looks a healthy weight, sadly getting more food from scavenging plants, and snaring the odd small animals - then when she had a market just down the road from her.
As she exits the tree line, she sits down the weight on her shoulders and takes her time to look over her house, her home. It has become a little tradition, for her to take a moment or two from each day to look at her little slice of heaven.
Age: Seventeen Years
Fay's POV
I'm seventeen today. I've been keeping track of the days, noting each one of them in an old notebook. I'm celebrating by putting the first brush of paint on the house today. After spending most of winter sanding the porch by hand, then the last weeks scraping the house of paint with no more than a rickety ladder and old wooden handled paint scraper, it will be nice to look at something more than exposed wood.
Each board will be a different colour and at the end I'm hoping it looks like a rainbow threw up on it. I laugh as I dip a scavenged brush in bright yellow paint and streak it across a random timber board. After the first is done I pick another random one then another and another and another half a dozen before swooping to light blue, then red, then pale green, then a little bit of pink and so many more colours. This takes up that whole day and the next four to follow.
On the fourth afternoon I step back and look at my own rainbow, my own colourful heaven. And it doesn't look as shocking as I was expecting… Really this house is better than anything I ever expected to find in the woods with an old friend and no sense of direction. I am lost for words with no other ears to hear, so I sit down for a while and smile, laugh, run my fingers through the fresh grass.
Age: Seventeen Years, one month
I'm curled up by the flickering fire, wrapped loosely in a blanket, just thinking… Just thinking that around this time of night, last year, I had arrived here on a night much like this one. I wonder where I'll be next year, I'm praying that I'll still be here in my heaven.
My eyelids grow heavier and heavier as I watch the dancing flame. I slowly lie down, not wanting to walk upstairs tonight. My breathing slows… Eyes close a little further… The last thing I hear is a wolf howling, it sounds sad as though it's lost something important to it. It makes me feel a little sad as other wolves join in on the sorrowful howling.
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