A Girl With a Glimmer
Hi,
Here’s the last instalment of my book… it’s actually just the first part of the book but the last part of what I’m sending your way for now …
Wishing you a hopeful and healthy new year and more connection to the things that make your heart happy in the year ahead. Writing, art, nature, my kids, teaching and doing healing work, surfing, eating chocolate, and singing make my heart happy. Thanks for being here and reading. I appreciate your support.
Sophie, the Girl with a Glimmer
At the edge of the forest where the bone creature had been blown by Raven, stood a narrow farm house whose buff stone and black slate roof had withstood the weather for nearly two hundred years.
It was where Sophie had been born. It was where her mother had died. It was where her father and brother stomped in and out every morning and night without kindness or care.
Sophie waited for Raven, Grandmother Raven to her, to come back.
It had been a month since she’d left and Sophie was scared and tired. She understood in a way a girl her age shouldn’t that she was prey. Hunted for her strangeness.
Before she’d even had words, Sophie had understood the mark on her chest she’d been born with, which her father called a scar - was a bad thing - a mark of her difference, and her unacceptability.
Grandmother Raven had taught her it wasn’t a scar. She believed that now. But she still didn’t know what it was other than the obvious: A thin cut of light.
It was quite literally a gap between her skin through which light beamed.
It glowed especially strong where the edges of it were like torn paper, frayed and ragged against the pale skin of her chest.
Sophies existence went against the hard and sombre lives of people accustomed to living under the reign of a king long dead. The world she was born into had been embittered and drained of all that was warm hearted and hopeful. The land was cold and hard, almost impossible to eak out an existence from; magic was so long gone and forbidden that no-one remembered it - and to see the evidence of magic and beauty shining from the child was so contrary to what people knew they turned it into something terrible.
“It’s a cursed birth mark” was the phrase often said to explain Sophie’s light.
Hard as she tried to keep it hidden with layers of clothes, a glint or crackle of light often escaped. It was trickiest to cover the upper edges where it reached like a vine, and licked at her throat.
“It strangles your breath.” Her father often said with disdain of the rattle that came when she walked up and down stairs and into cold air. It was hard not to believe him, she had been a sickly child.
No one knew what her thin cut of light was. It made everyone except for Raven and Coyote afraid and uncomfortable. Her brother enjoyed throwing other peoples loathing at her:
“Unspeakable - don’t put your eyes to it.”
“It burns to look at.”
“Better to keep away from my sister.”
Sophie knew only that her mother hadn’t been a strong woman, and that having Sophie probably killed her. She knew she was a shame to her father. She knew her mother had been something he called ‘a dreamer’ and that this wasn’t a good thing. And thus she understood why he managed her as he would one of his farm animals - with a rough adherence to what was needed, and no more.
Sophie didn’t know she had been created by an old angel and a little bird who’d seen possibility on the desolate grey isle in the form of witches bones come alive. She had no idea her life was the sliver of hope needed to break generations of cruelty.
Sophie never meant to hurt anyone with her light. She would have given anything to be acceptable and not stand out.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be sending out a different note soon with information about farm yoga retreats this year at my home in Nicaragua and my online classes.
Wishing you inspiration and a little wildness from my jungle home
Lucy