Amelia

• Saska Scoon , Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2013

Amelia looked up at the vast forest; the distant assembly of flora she’d been staring at from the battered Millscrest’s Orphanage building, for almost all of her 13 years. Now it was right in front of her and once again the little orphan felt that pulling, like an invisible string, with one end starting deep in her chest and the other tied up in the heart of the forest. Amelia remembered the orphanage windowsill, remembered how she’d sat, transfixed by the huge forest each night.
“Go back to bed,” the other girls had muttered.
“They’re calling me,” Amelia’s golden-flecked eyes had still shone with hope and energy despite the bleakness of her past.
“Oh, shut-up. Look if you’re here it’s because no-one wants you- or if they did their dead. Deal with it…. We all have to,” the girl’s tanned features were hardened beyond her years. Like most of the older girls, she’d given up the hope of adoption long ago, learning to be independent, but also bitter, discarding her own emotions and hopes like shoes she’d out-grown.
Amelia didn’t hate those older girls – in a way they were being completely reasonable. What was she was doing out here- in the dead of night, against the orphanage rules with not one person knowing where she was? A cool wind blew, sending a shiver through Amelia’s slight frame- but she wasn’t turning back now. There was a hint of magic in this forest, just like the stories Amelia would tell the younger girls back at the orphanage. These stories were more than just bedtime tales; they came from deep inside Amelia and made those little girls continue to hold hope close to their chest like teddies.
Amelia’s unruly, chestnut curls whipped around her face as she slowly stepped into the depths of the forest. The great trees cast sinister shadows that seemed to entwine together in an infinite web of darkness. Wind was whistling eerily through the forest that was now seemingly endless. She tried to think of the brightly coloured berries, delicate flower petals and almond eyed fawns that filled her stories. But even this could not stop the cold shivers the frosty wind sent down her spine, or the dark infinity the tree’s shadows created. Amelia stopped, her small frame a speck in the vastness of the forest. Her pupils peering out from beneath her thick lashes, searching her surroundings. Her head was telling her to be afraid. But her heart didn’t listen, ‘I’m meant to be here’ it seemed to whisper. And so the small girl, her golden-flecked eyes wide and searching, continued to tred gently through the endless forest.
Sooner or later, it was impossible to tell how much time had passed, Amelia began to see dark, ethereal figures slipping through the glossy leaves of the trees. Now her mind was screaming at her to be afraid, to run back to the bland Millscrest Orphanage, to the life she ‘knew’. But Amelia didn’t run. Her tattered skirts billowed around her as she stopped and stood completely still. Her brow furrowed as she tried to decipher the shadowy silhouettes, they were so imposing, so enchanting and out of this world- yet there was something human about them, and Amelia felt a niggling telling her there was something even familiar about them. More familiar than all those girls at Millscrest orphanage and the bitter, beige lives they were expected to live. Then, like smudges being wiped from a glass mirror, the forest seemed to become clearer. The shadowed figures began to approach Amelia- but wait, they were no longer shadowed. A willowy figure, with two golden-flecked eyes smiled softly with berry stained lips at Amelia.
“I think you’re finally home,” the figure said, her voice was soft and tinkling but held an underlying strength and her eyes shone with wisdom. Amelia looked up at the warm faces of the small group of women and young girls before her, then down at the floor beneath their bare feet, which was littered with plump, vibrant berries and delicate flowers with petals of coloured silks- and she knew undoubtedly she was home. Amelia smiled shyly into golden-flecked eyes so similar to her own.
And that night in the depths of the enchanted forest, those women with the magic of nature in their blood, who were blissfully hidden from the rest of a society that chose to fear anyone ‘different’, welcomed a long lost infant that was stolen from them 12 years ago.