THE LITTLE SICK GIRL

                                      THE LITTLE SICK GIRL[1]

Chapter One

Not very long ago, under a bright quarter moon, a little girl was born. The moon blinked as her round bald head popped out from inside her mother, and a purplish pale light came over the night sky. The wind stopped its gossiping for a moment. Even space and time eavesdropped. She was slow to take her first breath, as if unsure what the air might contain—tiny feathers maybe. But she gulped it down before the doctor had a chance to smack her bottom to make her cry. She wasn’t stupid.

The little sick girl was here, down among us.

Her parents were happy she was born, because they had always wanted a little girl.  Amber, she was christened, one day in their small kitchen (the microwave humming in the background as if it was excited). An older brother, Timmy, was already in the world, waiting for her to arrive. The moon and the wind had not disturbed themselves when he plopped into the world five years earlier. He was a strong healthy boy, with dark tufts of hair shooting from his scalp. They all lived in a small town, somewhere near Somewhere. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it, except it was where Amber came to Earth. It was like any other somewhere.

To all appearances, Amber looked like a perfectly normal child. Her straight blonde hair grew like any child’s, a bit more quickly than the rest of her. She cried and kicked and wet herself, and slept when it suited her, like any baby. Perhaps her light blue eyes (those miniature ponds of trapped light) opened rather wider and shut rather tighter than the average infant’s eyes, but not so as you would notice. She began to walk when her legs told her to, amazed she could stay upright on those tapering lengths of wax. She giggled when she took a few steps. Words soon began to jump from her mouth, like little acrobats of sound, twirling and somehow landing on their feet. She felt the preciousness and power of her words, as if each word carried a part of her into the outside world. And meanwhile her understanding grew: of people, animals, the sky, the dirt. Her mind formed itself, secretly, cleverly, until she was filled with it, until it was her.

That was when the first strange thing happened. Amber and Timmy were playing cards, fanning out hearts and diamonds, clubs and spades, slapping them down and yelling “I’ve won!”. She wasn’t very good at cards—she was only three years old—but sometimes she got lucky with the cards she was dealt. Then she felt that thrill of unearned good fortune: the world was being kind to her. She wanted to tell her brother about her good luck, but knew that wasn’t done. She kept quiet. She laid down her cards slowly and carefully. “Look,”’ she said, “a royal blush”. Timmy glared at her cards and angrily hit them with the flat of his hand. “You cheated!” he shouted. He scattered them across the carpet. “But I didn’t,” she protested. “I won”. Sullenly he replied, “Well, I’m not playing with you anymore. This is boring.” She gazed at him with a look of wonder and confusion in her eyes. Then she felt a peculiar welling up in her stomach. It was a sensation she had never felt before: a sharp nausea inside her, as if something nasty had slunk in there and badly wanted to get out. Normally her stomach was calm and quiet, but now it felt like erupting, like a volcano. She vomited onto the carpet. This created some new patterns and bright colors, but it wasn’t a work of art. She had made a picture—but of what?

Her mother sent her straight to bed, saying she must have eaten something she shouldn’t. Did she feel ill? Had she been eating too many sweets? These questions only made her feel worse and she felt the nausea well up again. In bed she wondered what had happened, but couldn’t make sense of it. Now the nauseous feeling had gone away, leaving only an unpleasant aftertaste and a premonition of what might be to come. All she knew was that she didn’t want it to happen again. Was she to blame for winning at cards? Did she enjoy the feeling too much? It seemed like some kind of message, but what was it?

[1] This is a children’s story I wrote nearly thirty years ago. I came across it by accident the other day and decided to convert it to electronic form and send it out. I intend to post it here a chapter at a time.