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She had hair of pale clouds and honey, a mixture of sunlight and fog and platinum waves, nebulous billowing tresses that draped down across her back like sprawling ivy breathing in a new day every minute, every second, every fraction of a heartbeat that you could be in her presence. It was a crown of amber atop a throne of a delicate neck, a medium build, and two long, lithe legs. The embodiment of an elder sister and all that she was. Her hair was full and unashamed and her most prized possession, and she would share this golden treasure with you.

You were a head above the clouds, a mind caught somewhere between the vastness of space and the gravity of earth, ensnared in that trap of reality and idealism that you could never seem to escape. Your ears were the tallest trees and your brain was a cerulean lung inhaling blueness and whiteness and grayness and your dreams were the very structure of the skies. A girl of pictures and air and skies and love. Clouds and nebulae, maps of paths you would never travel down, stars that would blow out but you wouldn't realize, couldn't realize, until millions of billions of years later because outer space is that vortex that it has always been, sucking in light and curiosity and hiding it somewhere just out of reach. The clouds that drifted across the sky were not clouds. They were shapes and stories, tales and telepathy of messages that only you could decode. They were your best friends. And they were always there.

The clouds were your friends and your family and your world, and your sister was a cloud, too; one of ambition and determination and stubbornness and raw beauty in its rarest form. If the roles were reversed you knew she wouldn't have said the same of you. You were meek. A follower, perhaps - someone who only became inquisitive when others' queries demanded it. And that was okay. You were the fisherman's youngest daughter, the older sister's little joy, the greatest clouds' proudest achievement.

In the daytime you studied for your classes, played with your sister, and watched the clouds. Come nightfall, when your father returned from the lakes where he fished, you would always ask him a question: "What's the weather tomorrow?"

He was an experienced fisherman, used to the changing of the skies and the affects it had upon the tides beneath them. More often than not he would provide a sufficient enough answer. Its accuracy was usually correct, but on the days when it wasn't, you never minded. These unexpected turns kept you searching for the patterns, the ones that would say, no matter what, with complete and total positivity, what tomorrow's clouds would hold. You knew that there was some rhyme or reason to it. What exactly that rhyme or reason was, however...well, that's what you had your future for.

But sometimes you were nothing more than the girl beneath the clouds.

The first time your father and sister got into an argument, you were only three years old. You didn't remember much of that day, of course, perhaps because of your young age or perhaps because you wanted to forget it; forget its existence and its causes and everything that occurred because of it. The shouting was still in your mind.

You didn't remember it well, but you remembered its effects. After the first blasts were released, you'd hidden beneath your bed, hugging your knees to your chest and feeling as though the walls were closing in on you. Again and again loud voices were heard, yells and shouts, groans and sarcastic laughter. Of it all, the one thing you could recall without a hitch was what your father's final, breathless, harsh words on the topic had been.

"Mamie [l/n], as long as you are my daughter, you are not joining the Garrison. You will not die like your mother."

Your sister, Mamie, had burst into the room the two of you shared, tears in her eyes and arms wrapped around her chest, like she could protect herself from the truth, from her father's overprotective will. She had slumped onto her bed, across the room from yours. And she had put her head in her pillow and sobbed.

This was when you'd emerged. Being young and innocent, filled with the pure compassion only seen within children, you had lifted yourself onto her bed and quietly asked, "What's wrong?"

Mamie was a good sister. The perfect sister, perhaps, because despite her internal torment, she pulled herself together for you. If there was one thing she would never do, it was hurt you by her own selfish manners. She would always be your beacon, you pillar of light, regardless of how much darkness she herself was facing.

"Let's read about the clouds," she had responded softly.

Your heart had fluttered in your chest. When Mamie read to you, the rest of the world didn't matter, because it was only you in her lap, playing with her hair of sunshine, listening to her voice of gilded intelligence and gentle reassurance, looking at the sketches of the clouds in your small encyclopedia. She read elegantly - she had all her life - but on that day not a single word was missed, a single syllable mispronounced. And the two of you had sat, age three and age ten, huddled together atop the covers, viewing your troubles away.

But this was only the first time.

The first of many.

SKY ⇻ [ bertholdt hoover ] ▼Where stories live. Discover now