Broken Pt. 2

(*Follow this link for the first post: Broken)

Now, in the pantry, I stretched myself and abruptly remembered how to fly—I began running until suddenly my wings caught air and lifted me off of the hardwood floor.  Once in the air I turned down the narrow, artificially lit hallway that led into the dining room.  No one waited for me; not even Marietta sat at her usual table.  Only I existed, a lightning bug in disguise. 

But while the restaurant was familiar, I knew it was not safe.  I would need to find some other shelter where I could clear my head, or better yet, where I could sleep and wake up again as something else.  In the restaurant lobby I therefore held my breath and squeezed through the narrowest of gaps between the locked double doors.  When I exhaled again I rolled, tumbleweed style, into the magnificent hall that joined the restaurant to the great corridor. 

This hall was, like the restaurant, empty and silent.  The noise of my beating wings sounded too loud in the stillness around me.  As I buzzed along, expecting to plummet to the ground at any moment yet moving forward all the while, I felt vaguely troubled.  My illness had made the many snickets of my mind as dusky as the sky outside, but that wasn’t the problem.  I’d been ill before.  I had forgotten before.  But when I’d woken up the other times, it was to find myself at school and late for a math exam, with just a faint, frustrated notion of where my classroom might be.  I was used to that, even if I hated it.  I was not used to this fairy business.

Uneasily, I wondered if I would ever be big again.  Where would I live until I was?  The dollhouse in the attic had gone long ago.  As with nearly everything else I cared about, it had been sacrificed for a future that kept morphing into a past I could not remember.