Somewhere, in the middle of a bountiful, borderless planes and a dank, forested greenland and the blank, open field there’s a girl who’s ten years old. She’s got bright green eyes that envision fairies dancing in the creek and short, dirty toes that swim alongside the minnows and draw mountains in the mud. She lives in a crooked brick house with five rooms and three beds. She has a mother with white hair cut short around her loving face who keeps one room in the house locked always. She knows she and her mother are both people, and that there are other people far away who look different and act different but that she should still be polite if she meets them. They’ve always lived together in the crooked brick house, and she knows she loves her mother and all the books on the dusty shelf in the living room, and she wouldn’t ever want to have anything else in life.
She reads a lot. Her mother taught her how from when she was four until she was six. After that, her mother had to work harder with the farming and she taught herself. She likes to help with the farming, she likes the chickens and the cows and the horses, she enjoys playing with the dirt and the mud in a way that her mother can’t ever be tired of, and she loves spending time with her mother and talking to her about her great ideas and fantastic things. Her mother likes spending time with her too, but she still tells her to read more. “You’ll grow up to do great things,” her mother said two days ago, “You’re going to make something fantastic happen that other people wouldn’t even be able to think of. Reading will make you smart, it will inspire you; I’m not going to be the one to get in your way. I love you.”
But that was two days ago, and after that her mother started acting in a way that she recognized as strange. Her mother went into the locked room twice each day, and told her that she must read even more so.
So the girl spent all of this day reading a chapter book about elves. When she was done with that one she read a nice story about big, puzzle-shaped places with little people that were friends and rose up again and again and again. Before she goes to bed, her mother says, “You’re beautiful, always remember that.” She looks at herself in a hand mirror as she sits on her mattress. She sees her own green eyes and her own long red hair and freckles and thinks that maybe someday she’ll be as beautiful as her mother.
When she wakes up, there are two people in the living room standing by the bookcase. She does not recognize them in the slightest, but she’s polite to them as her mother told her she should be. At this time her mother is sitting in the big blue chair, giving them a look she’s not sure she’s ever seen before. Her mother asks for her to sit on the couch, and it is explained to her that these two are men by the names of Luis and Sawyer, that she shouldn’t be worried and shouldn’t ask too many questions. Her mother starts walking to the outhouse, and Luis asks the girl if she could take him on a walk, and she says she could and will. They take a few steps out into the field before the girl sees a creature known as an automobile that she read about a while ago from a faded book with boring pictures. It’s green and it’s black and it’s new and exciting, so she runs out to it and promptly forgets not to ask too many questions. Luis smiles, he understands, he says. He works with little girls the same age as her. He asks if she would like to go for a ride in the automobile, and she is very eager to accept. He drives her around for a while, they go through trees and small valleys and he crunches right over streams and fallen branches that she loved to climb on. Finally they get back to the house, just in time for Sawyer to hop in, and then they start driving again. She asks about her mom. They answer with comments about the color of some passing trees or the desert as they roll over it. They don’t stop driving, and she doesn’t stop asking.
Night falls, and Luis says he has some presents for her. Bracelets, he says. It would be rude not to accept, so she lets him fasten one around each wrist. They’re black and cold and smooth and round and a little bit heavier than she was expecting. She asks about her mother. They stop driving, they say she needs sleep and so do they. They say there’s more driving ahead of them. She asks about her mother.
