Aleia

Aleia is a “Fant” (short for “Fantasy Creature”, also, child of a parent who was addicted to magic).  Her mother smoked Sylph, the most dangerous of the magical drugs, and as a result, when Aleia tries to feel any kind of emotion, she turns to air.  Aleia is a new friend of Gemma’s, the Fairy-girl in OGW 9/24/09, 10/29/09, 2/4/10, 5/27, 7/29, 9/16.  Both girls appear in the novel I’m working on, Wings.

Aleia:  Sometimes I think the worst thing about being part-Sylph is not being able to feel my heart beat.  Or break.

     After Gemma leaves to find out more about her mother, for a moment I feel something, something like a soreness inside, something like a green stick bending bending bending until –

     The image blows away, and so do I. 

     See, the thing with us Fants is that our emotions bring out the elements of our deformities.  I’m the most deformed of all.  I don’t get to just sport a fancy glowing horn-nub like Luke, or have long, luxurious hair like Lola.  Sure she has scales, but only on her legs, and she can cover them if she wants.

     Me, I turn to smoke.  Wind, if I’m really upset.  Polluted wind, that’s what it feels like when my heart breaks.

     Gemma wants to find her mother, who smoked Fairy Dust.  Big deal, right?  Not to me.  My mother smoked Sylph, smoked the actual spirit of the air, made the spirits disappear and made herself disappear finally, like she always wanted.

     Floating near the ceiling, not joining in the conversation with my friends as they discuss Gemma and whether they can trust her and where she came from and all that stuff that I don’t want to hear because it’s what made that beding greenstick feeling happen and then made me change from little girl to air…

     Anyway, I am what I am. 

     My mother never could be.  She was so tiny, with fingers like slender bird bones that floated over the piano keys.  I liked to lie under the grand piano we had and the instrument was my sky, and I could put my hands up and touch it, feel the sky, feel it vibrate.  Feel my mother’s heart, in her music.

     Hear her voice, like sparkling drops of rain or sharp jewels… flowing like a stream or racing like a river… everything, everywhere.  Mine.

     But her music was all she had, all she thought she had.  Forget my father or me -- she did.  Forget that she made her first album when she was nineteen and she went on tour and she had fans and everyone said she was the next big thing.

     She wasn’t, and so after a while, she forgot.  She forgot everything, except how to play and sing and cry.  Eventually, to smoke.  Smoke Sylph until she disappeared into the breeze, and it was just the way she wanted it, I think, to be the air moving the chimes outside the window, but not to be in the real world of solid things like broken dreams and hearts.

     The ache in me makes me swell, like a dark cloud.  But I cannot rain.  I cannot feel what I want to feel, like everyone else.  I can only sink into a shadow in the corner, and imagine that my heart is broken because I will never have a mother again.