Faier

• Gabrielle Weine, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2016

What if? It was a common thought that ran through my brain constantly, weightlessly, subconsciously. What if I did this? What if I did that? What if I changed things? Being stuck and confined in a world were nothing is possible. To survive all we have to do is eat, sleep and reproduce. They are the fundamentals of life. Days are routine, a flurry of hunting. Nothing is exciting anymore.
Sitting in my endless array of a home, I wait for excitement. The conversation of the elders travels in one ear and without being fathomed travels back out the other. My gaze is fixated on the stars and my hands fumble with two stones I found when hunting today. I toss them around trying to find the joy within them but nothing sticks.
Without purposeful motion the two rocks forcefully brush one another and a small amber spark fills the black of the night. I begin to repeat the movement like a broken record watching the amber glows float to the ground with determined grace. It becomes a game; a fight to light up the earth; to make these mini stars glisten in my atmospheric bubble. They illuminate my eyesight and yet they have gone unnoticed by the elders around me.
I sit fixated on what I have discovered. So simple, yet so fascinating. An amber star falls to the dry leaves beneath my feet and suddenly those leaves too glow a luminous orange. It dawns on me that the orange lumosity growing on the leaf is also the hot ranging monster that destroys our home. Panic fills my stomach as I flail my arms in wordless attempts to render assistance. The elders don't seem to care!
But the glow doesn't seem to be spreading or raging. It doesn't seem angry or hungry for destruction. It seems small and dainty, helpful and yet still powerful. Once calmness returns to my body I sit down on a large stone and stare. My body appreciates the heat of the orange glow and it relaxes my mind and muscles. I begin to stare in awe of the amber stars that float up into the night and join the other stars in arrays of constellations that make up the stories of the sky. The elders begin to join me. We nestle around the illumination and discuss the success of the day and the way in which we will conquer tomorrow.
I begin to feel my eyelids droop and my focus has little ability left to withhold. I hop off the rock and rest my head on the soft ground that surrounds me. My eyes flutter and my vision flashes from black to amber again and again until black is all I can stand anymore. A soft hand touches my head and I am able to make out the voice of my mother “Goodnight Faier, sleep with the angels and rejoice us with your mind tomorrow”