Page 52 of Ruby
If we were together, she would have let me know just exactly how she feels about long walks.
There are more civilizations than I ever bothered myself to know but the grounded creatures preferred to stay grounded and my species dominated the air and were bigger than whatever contraptions they would want to send into the sky.
The ship that killed my brothers and captured me was foreign, something we had never witnessed before and that was why it took us by such surprise.
I don’t know much about technology here, or at all but it does not seem like there are many native creatures intelligent enough to use it anyway.
The night deepens and I am angry at myself for not getting to Ani quick enough. I nearly failed her once before.
I would not be able to live with the thought of losing another being I care about. The only reason I have weathered the loss of my flockmates, Nnaiv, and my wings this well has been due to the relationship that has budded between me and her. If I had not been so single-minded in my mission to return her to her people, I would surely have collapsed from grief and my injuries long ago.
21
Ani
Finding solace in my dreams went as well as anyone would imagine. Not even in my imagination was I spared the grimness of my reality. Waking up multiplies my discomfort and the harsh light filtering into my eyes brings a finality to my plight.
The beady eyes fixed on my cage make me ache for the once-odd, but now precious, blue-green gaze of Szhe’ka. To think I was annoyed at his watchfulness, and now I am stuck with dead seal eyes.
They must have watched me even as I slept, as if slipping away under cover of night would have been effortless. Their gathering would have discouraged any predators, and they clearly chose a good vantage point in the forest.
I shudder and I can tell they like it.
A valium would be far too much to hope for right now. Maybe a stimulant to keep my mind from galloping would be the betterfit, but this isn’t really a situation where more clarity would help me cope.
Without either to help, instead my mind rushes, turning to its favorite activity: Self-flagellation and overthinking.
I have led a pathetic life, whispers the ugly voice,and I will have this pathetic death.
Except, isn’t this what I wanted? It’s really becoming clear that despite my situation, I’m finally free of the fame.
Free, I think with a snort. I still don’t know the meaning of that word.
Trapped in a body that is changing. Trapped in a cage. Free of my mother. Free of fame.
This freedom is like melted gold being dropped on my hands in slow drips. Gold is valuable but the pain is scorching.
Now, this freedom, the cooling gold in my hand, won’t mean much in my hands if I’m trapped without escape. But that’s too bleak a thought to tide me over in this tasteless cell. If I’m miserable in real life, I can always use my imagination.
So what should I imagine?
If by some kind of miracle, I manage to escape this bleak fate and return to Earth like this, the first thing I’ll do is give the people who know me a heart attack. My stylist would probably lose his mind seeing my hair.
The Witch probably would have a hard time recognizing me. She pruned me to be the perfect doll after all. How could her perfect doll look like a wild spirit of the mountains? Her perfect garden becoming a hedge of weeds would be the most noteworthy disaster of all time.
My first therapist would probably try to ascribe one mental illness or the other. She’d make bank if she capitalizes off my delusion.
My friends, well… it would be far fetched to say I have any. Genuine friendship has always been something that has managed to elude me time and time again. It’s hard to make friends when everyone you’ve ever met is locked in an endless competition with you. For people who hardly knew me or how much I had suffered to become the perfect doll they saw, they envied me.
They envied the perfect figure I had starved for. They envied the perfect hair my mother spent time obsessing over, like she was the old crone inRapunzel. They envied my voice, my tone, my accent. They wanted to be perfect and exotic like I was. They were all clowns participating in a show made to entertain mindless drones.
I too, at some point, envied their freedom. I envied the secretary that used to work for a model I knew, even though everyone always bullied her for being fat. I wanted to know how it felt to eat as freely as she did. She told me she envied me once, and I just scoffed. I wish I had told her that it wouldn’t matter how you starve yourself. People still call you fat. I should have told her she was beautiful, because she was.
But, oh, I still listened to their mocking and changed myself. A mindless drone I was, locked in a constant struggle and yearning for a freedom that did not exist.
Despite this, when I was still such a naïve child, I wished for friends. I was truly like Rapunzel, locked in a tower and told I was better than the other little girls. When I was finally let out of the tower and was introduced to others, I thought they would be the same as me, dolls behind a glass panel.
Growing up, while my experience was unique, the people I met were as power thirsty as my mother. Of all the roles my mother arranged for me as a child, none put me in a position to make better friends. Realistically, I was more likely to make enemies than friends because everyone wanted to get the lead role.
