A Girl of the Paper Sky
A GIRL OF THE
PAPER SKY
Randy Mixter
My dearest Brian,
I am so glad that you have now made it to the halfway point over there. Five months and 29 days to go until we once again become one. I’m so sorry to hear about your friend Kenny. His family and friends are in my prayers.
Here, things remain the same. I went to church this morning with my aunt, and we both said a special prayer for your return. I think she misses you almost as much as I do (if that’s possible).
Anyhow, we had a birthday party at our house for my uncle, Allen, yesterday. The weather cooperated and Aunt Betsy grilled hamburgers and hot dogs while my cousins, Stevie and Beth splashed each other in the wading pool. By six, everyone had gone home except for the guest of honor who seemed determined to spend the night. Uncle Allen finally left at around eight or so.
Now I’m sitting at the kitchen table writing this letter while Aunt Betsy sits in the living room watching Gunsmoke.
I guess I’d better get to the important stuff. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out the best way to say this. I had another one of my crazy dreams last night, and yes, you were in it again.
I dreamt I saw you walking through a field of tall grass. There were other soldiers walking with you but spread out some, and all of you had rifles in your hands. I must have been on a hill or something because I was looking down on you as you walked away from me.
Now things got weird (don’t they always!). I called your name but you didn’t turn around. Then a feeling came over me, a feeling that something evil was near, something that meant to do you harm.
I yelled your name again, louder this time, and I finally got your attention. You stopped and turned toward me, but you didn’t see me, did you? Your eyes found me but you didn’t see me. And then a black shadow rose up out of the grass behind you and I knew you were in trouble. “LOOK OUT,” I yelled, “WATCH OUT BEHIND YOU!”
You must have heard me because you turned around and the shadow seemed to get sucked into the grass like a genie going back into a lamp.
You looked down and then you lowered into the grass until you disappeared. I waited for as long as I could, until the dream began to dissolve around me, and only then did I see you rise up again.
I did wake up after that, but it wasn’t long before I was back to sleep. I had the feeling that everything was fine. Was I right, Brian? Everything was fine wasn’t it? Okay, I’ll come right to the point. Did I save your life last night? Because I kinda think I did.
All my love forever,
Lori
A FIRE IN THE SKY
I arose from my bed to a room of colors. They ran across the ceiling, then to the walls, and finally to the floor. I raced to the window and saw a sky of fire, the flames the colors of the rainbow.
“It’s a paper sky”, my mother said from behind me. “It can only be seen by special people at special times. Let’s go outside to get a better view.”
We faced the morning sky together, my mother and I.
“Why is it called a paper sky?” I asked her.
“The colors are God’s writing. That’s how God writes, in ribbons of color. Look, over there.” She pointed to the clothesline pole. A bird perched there, its wings outstretched, flapping.
“Do you see?”
“Yes, it’s made of paper,” I said.
“No,” my mother corrected me. “It’s made of dreams. Now watch closely, this won’t last long, and you need to see what comes next.”
She wrapped her arm around me, something I rarely tolerated, but on this morning it seemed right.
“The sky will only hold its beauty for so long, so enjoy the show while it lasts.” She held her head back, looking up, as she said this, for now the colors had spread to the air above us, and her lips began to move. “Ten, nine, eight…”
The sky, for as far as I could see, swirled in color. “Six, five, four…”
The colors brightened and spun into tiny tornados that swooped low and near. The sky was coming to us.
“Two, one…”
Everything changed in a second. Everything I knew about nature, about the world, changed. The colors had arrived on earth and everything looked different. The grass in our backyard was red. The trees around us became yellow, their leaves purple. I turned to our house. It had become a cartoon of blues, pinks, greens, and combinations of the three.
Then, they vanished, all at once, and everything returned to normal. Except now, a scarecrow stood at the far side of the field behind our house. It stood in a small circle of darkness, a place where no colors touched.
I knew my mother saw it too, because she gripped my shoulder tightly, and when I turned to her, I again saw her lips move, but she was no longer counting. She was saying a prayer.
I looked back to the field. The scarecrow had lowered its arms, and I felt something come over me, something cold and restless.
“Don’t dream,” my mother said. “It wants you to dream, but don’t.”
And then she said something that would haunt me forever. She grabbed both of my shoulders and swung me around to face her. She dropped to her knees, and I had to look down to see her face. There, in her eyes were the colors of the sky. They were hiding there the whole time.
“What is it mom? You can tell me. I’m old enough. Tell me.”
“It doesn’t know love,” she said, and as her eyes returned to normal, I woke up.
Don’t dream
, my mother told me.
Don’t dream
. How can that request be obeyed? It can’t. In the six years since that dream of beauty and terror, I’ve had many dreams, usually at least one a night. I would guess I fit into the category of normal in that regard. You know how it goes. You have a dream and it seems vividly real at the time. Then, when you wake the next morning, the dream is either forgotten or a foggy recollection making no sense to real life occurrences. This is the way it went for me, over the years, until last night - when the paper sky returned.
My mother was there, once again, standing beside me and we watched the sky swirl with colors. This time though I knew it would change. I knew the colors would vanish and that something dark, something evil, lived in the void left behind. The scarecrow was coming, and I told my mother. I told her to hide behind me, that she’d be safe there, because the dark thing did not want me, it wanted her.
It’s hard to explain what happened next. The dream (or nightmare) was so real. My mother took my advice and hid behind me, and the scarecrow came, still distant, but closer somehow, closer than before.
A bird made of paper flew overhead, circling. It swooped down and landed on the clothesline pole next to the house I was born in, the house where my mother died. The bird, though eyeless, could still see me just fine. I knew that. It stared at me before it turned its attention to the scarecrow in the field.
The paper bird lifted into the air on a breeze I felt against my back and soared into the open field.
Don’t go there. It’s dangerous.
Flying past my mother’s garden, where ripe tomatoes hung from vines, past my swing set, rusty from neglect, into the open land where corn once grew in rows as far as the eye could see.
It never flapped its paper wings. The wind took it straight and true, into the circle of darkness, the realm of the scarecrow. It never turned, never looked back.
So brave,
I thought,
a bird made of paper, so fragile against the mighty sky.
The dark circle twisted and turned as the bird flew nearer, and I saw the scarecrow at its center lower its arms and vanish into the earth. The circle of night surrounding it disappeared as well, just as the bird reached it. The paper bird continued flying straight and true, until it vanished on the horizon.
“He retreats to the safety of the soil, but he will return,” the voice behind me said.
I turned to see a young girl standing there, as young as I had been when I first saw the paper sky years before.
“You can save yourself and the ones you love. It won’t be easy. He will lay traps for you, and you must always be on the lookout for them.”
“Are you my mother?” I asked the young girl.
“It’s strange how dreams work, Lori, but this is how you will see me. There are those here who have but one purpose, to protect you from harm. I am one of many,” she said, without answering my question and leaving me with more.
She reached up and touched my cheek. “Soon I will leave you and become a memory, but first we must talk. I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. I had hoped your life would be one of peace and joy.”
Her hand fell away. “I didn’t think he would find you. I thought I had hidden you away, far away from his sight.” The young girl shook her head and her eyes reddened, but no tears fell.
“He comes from another time, another place, and he will destroy you and all you love if you let him. He took my husband before I knew how to fight him. I was too late to save him.” Now a tear did fall. She wiped it from her eye angrily, the way a twelve year old might do.
“They called it an accident. That’s how you knew it, as an accident, but it was
he
who did it, the man who lives in the paper sky. He brings beauty first, but then sorrow follows. Sorrow and death.”
The girl looked to the sky. “I had hoped for just the beauty. It wasn’t meant to be.” She lowered her head and her eyes found mine. “He searches in dreams. He searches until he finds those who pose a danger to him. It may take years - there are so few of us - but it makes no difference to him, for he is immortal. Time is not his enemy.”
She looked at me and her eyes brightened. Once again, as before, I saw the colors hiding there. “You are.”
“One can be defeated, but there is strength in numbers. You must seek out others of your kind; it is your only hope.”
“How?” I asked. “How will I know?”
“I will tell you, if I can. The rest will be up to you. I’m sorry. I wanted you to have a normal life.”
The girl smiled at me, a sad smile tinged with worry. “He can be vanquished. I’m certain of it, but you must be brave, you must be the paper bird that flies toward evil without fear, without regret.”
I was crying and didn’t know it until I felt the tears running down my cheeks. The sky had darkened, infused by clusters of stars, and a full moon hung low on the horizon. “I tried not to dream, like you told me. I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry.” I said.
“It’s not your fault, Lori. Don’t blame yourself.”
My mother stood next to me, looking into the distance. A light, barely noticeable, flickered on the horizon, and despite the dark I saw her smile.
“Where did the girl go?” I asked her.
“Home,” my mother said and kissed my forehead as she had done each night when I was young and needed the reassurance of her love to guide me into sleep.
“It will soon be time to wake.” My mother became transparent; I could see through her to the field beyond. “Your journey has begun.” Her words echoed as they too became hollow. “Your destiny lies between the worlds,” she said, as she became a wisp of smoke carried away on the wind.
Some things you leave behind. I didn’t tell my mother about my dream. As it turned out, she already knew, but I didn’t mention it that morning. It was the first day of my last year of high school and in my excitement I shrugged it off as a weird dream that dissolved into a nightmare.
Poplar High School, in my hometown of Clarksdale, Ohio was built in 1948, and yes, they did name the school after a type of tree. The unfortunate choice of a name resulted in the defacement of any Poplar High School signage with the word NOT. Not Poplar became the default name of our school many years ago and has stayed that way since.
I hadn’t decided what direction I wanted to take in life at the time. I was behind the curve, in that respect. For a while, I had thought of becoming a veterinarian, until I found out they also put animals to sleep. Then I became interested in teaching, where I’d only be putting the kids in my class to sleep. The fact was, no career really appealed to me to the extent of investing thirty years or so into it.
College? I had the grades and my parents had the money. I thought of applying to Westbrook in Columbus, where I could major in English Lit and just tread water for a couple of years until I decided my fate. It wasn’t a plan for the rest of my life, but it was a start.
And so I started my school year as a question mark, when I wanted to be an exclamation point. Soon, that would change. I didn’t know it at the time, but very soon I would have a goal in life.
I almost made the homeroom bell, missing it by just seconds. It was enough to provoke a cool stare from Miss Reynolds. Getting off on the wrong foot, a motto I lived by.
I acknowledged my two best friends, Barb Sanders and Shirley Kensington, with a nod of my head. They sat by the back wall, as far from the teacher as possible while still being in the room. The classroom was crowded and I had little choice but to sit in the first row where there were plenty of empty seats.
Normally homeroom was a way station, a fifteen-minute respite before the school day actually began. On the first day of a new school year, however, homeroom became a staging area where school rules and regulations were drilled into our adolescent brains. These instructions went in one ear and out the other without any processing whatsoever. I was a senior after all. I knew what to do, when to do it, and who to do it with, so I tuned Miss Reynolds down, not out, just down to a pleasant humming drone in the background.
I thought of my dream, tornadoes of every color imaginable, a paper bird, and a scarecrow - dark and distant,
but moving closer
.
I stared at Miss Reynolds’ back as she wrote on the blackboard. “This is important,” she said as she wrote. “It’s the one rule you must follow.”
She turned and looked straight at me as she pointed to the words. “Do you understand, Lori?”
I looked at the blackboard.
YOU MUST NOT DREAM was written there, in big block letters.
“Do you understand, Lori?”
Her face blinked out and my mother’s face replaced it. “It’s dangerous.”
A hand touched my arm and the room shuddered, that’s the only way I can describe it. Then, a whisper in my ear. “You okay?”
Miss Reynolds had finished writing on the blackboard and she had her face back.
“I’m fine,” I said, but now I wasn’t certain.
I’m a daydreamer, I admit it. Usually my mind begins to wander an hour or so after lunch and, unless I’m entertained enough to keep a firm grip on reality, I’ll stay a daydreamer until the final school bell rings.
Daydreaming in homeroom never happens. So maybe I dozed off. Okay, I can live with that. I dozed off into a light sleep; kind of like a nap, except I don’t remember closing my eyes. I remember watching Miss Reynolds the entire time.
As if things couldn’t get any weirder, while I was trying to sort these things out in my head, I looked around to see I was the only one in the classroom. Everyone had left, including Miss Reynolds. I was alone.
I made it to my first official class at the bell, and because I was last to arrive I had to take a seat in the dreaded first row with the smart students who always knew the answers. I nodded to Barb and Shirley sitting in their customary place against the rear wall. We had been the three amigos last year, sharing notes and gossip, and laughing at all the wrong times. We had even hung out for most of the summer. Now, a new face sat between them, a nice looking guy with blonde hair who I had never seen before. He was talking and they were laughing. Not good.
No daydreams interrupted the next forty minutes, just boring history lessons. And this teacher, who announced that this was his first year here, started at the very beginning. Cave dwellers had just begun to walk the Earth when the end of class bell rang.
“That was Brian,” Barb said as we walked the hall to our English class. “He’s new here. A transfer from Belvedere.”
I was more than a little upset that she hadn’t held the seat between them for me and told her so. Barb immediately threw the blame on Shirley, who walked next to us.
“Okay, I’ll admit it. He’s cute. I wasn’t about to say no,” Shirley said.
“So I lost my seat because the new guy is good-looking. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes,” they said in unison.
I’m rarely at a loss for words, but that was one of those times. I just raised my hands in the air and walked away. Betrayal by my best friends on the first day of school. The thought upset me more than my vision of Miss Reynolds with my mother’s face. If you think I had my priorities scrambled, you’d be right. Before the day ended, I knew the difference between matters of importance and matters of little consequence. I began the day as a teenager and ended it as an adult.