Chapter 3: In a Perfect World
In the void, the World Guardian dreams.
She's a little girl again, no more than four or five. The day is light, and she and her daddy are off to pick vegetables for lunch today, her hair bouncing in spry pigtails. Daddy carries her on his back as they walk along the farm road outside Ar-doog-ni (at least that's how she thinks it is called, the name was so confusing and who comes up with that stuff anyways?), and she carries the vegetable baskets, one plopped over her head like a helmet and two on her arms.
Daddy's digging up the tomatoes with a spade, and she's too little to do that but she helps by slowly pulling one of the cabbages up, wiggling it out of the earth. Her overalls are dirty by the time he's finished with the rest of the tomatoes and moved to the cabbages, and at last she succeeds, the cabbage missing a few leaves as she holds up her treasure.
There's a thing sitting on top of the cabbage, and daddy tells her that it is a caterpillar. It's fuzzy and stripy and she giggles at the feeling as she pets it, while daddy puts the rest of their hard work into the baskets. She names it Nana and tells it stories about her and daddy as they walk home while it nibbles on the leaves of its perch.
The next day Nana's gone, and in its place is something that reminds her of a lumpy bean. She cries, thinking that Nana has left, but daddy says that the bean is actually just Nana sleeping in a cocoon, and that she will wake up and turn into something beautiful.
She's sitting outside one day with the cabbage on her lap, singing softly to Nana when the cocoon cracks. Out emerges Nana, now a beautiful six winged butterfly. It flutters around her, green shiny sparkles falling, and then flies off, as she waves goodbye to it.
05-Jun-2014 09:33:12
- Last edited on
05-Jun-2014 10:04:38
by
Talja
