Daffodils

• Zoe Mcdonald, Grade 11, Brisbane Girls Grammar School
• Short Story
• 2014

Excellence Award in the 'The Text Generation 2014' competition

The fractured light bled like liquid gold onto the girl’s pale skin, giving colour to her hollowed cheeks and illuminating the flecks of green in eyes as brown as the stringy lengths of hair falling down her back. She seemed quiet, quieter than usual – her eyes were turned down towards the faded bus seat in front of her, a shiver causing her thin shape to quiver like an autumn leaf fluttering from the trees.
He watched her now, curious as ever, his extremities numb from the cold seeping through the clothes and into his bones.
He adjusted his position, only to follow the girl who abruptly stood and wandered off the now stationary bus. She ambled down the road to a small paddock hidden behind oak trees tall and thick with age, brambles concealing her form as she stepped behind them and into the open.
The boy felt a thrilling rush of energy as he followed her trailing steps, the mysterious girl with hollowed cheeks and shift-dresses that hid the sharp, jutting angles of her ribcage, with a splash of almost-invisible freckles like the remnants of a super nova exploding across the careful arch of her nose.
He pushed past the brambles, eyes squinting against the thick morning sunlight perforating the gaps between the leaves.
Once the boy emerged from the other side, he spotted the girl – she was crouched at the edge of a dam, as ordinary as any other, with a bundle of home-picked daffodils in her hands. She seemed forlorn as she stared down at the milky-tea water, stagnant like her expression, unmoving and unaware of the lanky boy observing silently from behind a eucalypt.
She stayed like that for a long time, the boy noted, with her head hung low and her figure still. A breeze caused the long lengths of hair to lift from her face, and the boy frowned as he saw streaks of wet down her sun-kissed cheeks.
He wandered over to the girl, footsteps crunching on the grass layered with early morning dew. He thought maybe he should have been quieter, but any stealth had been long abandoned.
The boy stopped directly behind the girl. She had laid the flowers down now, a sea of bright yellow floating on the dull sheen of the dam water. The boy looked up and saw dozens of other flower bundles, now wilted or rotting from exposure.
‘Why do you put flowers in the dam?’ the boy asked. It seemed rude, after consideration, but the girl answered anyway.
‘For my sister,’ she said quietly. ‘She drowned here when I was little.’ The girl looked up, turning her large eyes to his. It caused the boy to gulp. ‘Why did you follow me here?’
The boy shrugged as nonchalantly as he could manage. ‘I wanted to see where you went every morning.’
The girl didn't respond, so the boy settled himself next to her. It was quiet, but pleasingly so; the sun shone bright like the daffodils.