Raven Flight

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Long Forgotten Memories

(and longest chapter so far!!!)

That night, I fell straight to sleep, pushed over the edge by my exhaustion. It had been one of the longest days of my life, and had drained me both mentally and physically. Long after Thomas had left I had stayed up thinking, but the afternoon soon wore into night and not even my troubled thoughts and aching body could keep me from sleep.

The next morning I woke with a start from an interesting dream, it was almost like a memory from back when I had lived in the orphanage. I shuddered as the realness of the dream state clung to my body like the sweat drenched sheets around me. Though most nights dreams faded with the morning like they should, it seemed that memories of the past lingered the longest. It must have been brought on by my mind going to sleep while still in high gear last night. I shook my head again, but couldn't get the scenes out of my head, and the more they played, the more familiar they became, the feelings more vivid as the memory became real to me.

I was a young girl of eight or nine, and I had been doing a lot of planning for an upcoming prank I was going to pull with some of the older kids. The mornings were filled with me hiding away in my room, pretending to be asleep until my room mate Alison left to do her studies; she might have been a bully but I knew she wished for a different life. It was almost like if she worked hard enough she would overcome the fact that she was an orphan with no hope. I had always accepted it and made do with my own imagination to pull me through, but that never seemed to be enough for her; that's probably why she led such a miserable life.

Once Alison had left, I would speed through my homework, filling the answers in with the sheets the older kids had given me, not caring if the answers on their papers were even right or not. A deal had been made between all of us kids that were in on the prank: They would supply the homework and excuses as to why I wasn't present around the orphanage, since we weren't allowed to lock ourselves in our rooms all day, and do most of my chores, while I would do all of the preparing and designing and building, I would pretty much head and set up the whole thing. Though I was never the smartest for schoolwork (always cheating didn't help of course), I was the brightest person when it came to common sense and planning. While any of the other children might have been older, they would never have thought about when each of the adults went to bed, got up, when the sun rose, when it was easiest to sneak around without the floorboards squeaking, things like that. If any of them were in charge, we would all be caught and punished severely before we had stepped out of our rooms, and they knew it. Because of this, I was always the mastermind to the plans, while they were just able to reach the taller cupboards and carry heavier things, so they were much like backup agents.

On this particular prank we were planning on not only getting the teachers, but also pillaging the kitchen for ourselves. This is what made it so precarious. Many, many kids had attempted this before and had always been caught by Cook, the meanest, nastiest adult that lived in the orphanage. She alone could make the older kids cry just by looking at them, and the younger children never looked at her face when in her presence, so that they didn't flee or worse, soil themselves, which really made her mad. It was rumored that she had been a military chef before she was hired at the orphanage, and that in times of shortages, she would visit the camp infirmary for fresh meat. We're all pretty sure she was the cook who officially named the camp cafeteria the “Mess Tent,” and that in memory of her gruesome time spent in service, they had never changed the name.

Every kid that had ever made it past her went down in storybook history, or at least that's what we said at the time, since we only had legends passed down from older years of kids telling us of a few brave souls who accomplished it long ago, but it didn't have the happy ending that most of us would have wished. They may have made it past Cook, but she always took inventory every morning, and they were always caught with food in their bedrooms, stashed in their mattresses and in loose floorboards and roughly patched holes in the walls. After that they were done for, never seen again.