An Incident By The Creek

“You see that creek over there?” The little girl’s mother gestured to the rapids at the bottom of the hill. 

She peered with curiosity and took a step closer to get a better look. Her mother put an arm in front of her. She drawled out a warning loud and clear, then took a long swig of her glass of water. “Never go down to that river. You hear me? There will be dire consequences.”

The little girl looked up and stared curiously at her mother’s drawn face. Despite the woman’s apparent youth, she looked far older than her daughter had ever seen her before.

She squeezed her mother’s hand, eyes trained on the rushing waters below. “I will never go down to that river. You don’t have to worry, Ma.”

Her mother squeezed her hand. “Good.”

She intended to keep her promise, she really did, but sometimes circumstances change. Sometimes push comes to shove. Sometimes you end up breaking a promise you swore to keep on your life and everything you ever held dear.

It was a clear summer day just several months later when she got a tad too close to the river. She had spent the afternoon folding paper cranes with her older brother under the house’s porch until he had to get the week’s groceries. Even when he was gone, she kept folding until her hands cramped up. Subsequently, she went outside to the hill by their home to play in her imagination on her lonesome.

The incident happened on a clear summer day. The weather was good. The clouds were practically frozen in the sky. She hadn’t expected for a sudden wind to pick up or for her paper cranes to fly out of her arms all at once. They scattered in every direction simultaneously and she scrambled to retrieve the ones that were still salvageable.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, she spied a straggler. It danced in the wind, doing backflips over invisible obstacles. It looked so weightless, fluttering gently down. It would have hit the cool grass if not for the sudden gust of wind so strong the little girl had to squint her eyes and bend her knees to root herself into the ground.

When the wind had slowed a bit, she spotted the crane once again, sitting right at the edge of the hill, tilting precariously off.

Everything was so, so still until the next gust of wind came. It knocked the crane off the edge and it pushed her feet into action as she lunged toward the edge.

One foot caught on an unearthed root and a jolt ran up her body as gravity grasped at her from all the wrong angles.

When she landed she was covered in dirt. She pushed herself back onto her feet and brushed off the filth quickly. Her mother would scold her so much later.

Then across the river she saw the crane again. It was dirt coated and a little wet, but still intact otherwise.

She sprinted for it.

One foot in front of the other.

The tips of her fingers just barely grazing the paper.

But just as she managed to touch the crane, it crumbled into a substance finer than sand and scattered in the wind.

The world seemed to flip upside down as tears pricked at her eyes. When she removed her sleeve from her tear-stained face she was no longer by the creek. By all means, it looked and sounded exactly like the creek near her home, but deep down she knew this was not her creek. When she glanced up the hill, her house no longer stood at the top. 

So, with no other choice, she turned around and continued further into the forest.

—

A distraught brother returned not ten minutes later to an empty house.

A composed mother returned hours later.

“That girl shouldn’t have gone down to the creek,” she said nonchalantly. Her voice was hoarse.

Many years later a gust of wind blew.

A young woman emerged from the creek, a sob of grief caught in her throat.

She was too late, she realized as she watched the world around her unravel.

—

The girl proceeded down the creek that was not her creek. She walked until her feet went numb, some unspeaking force propelling her forward. The stars’ light guided her. The rustling leaves of the trees whispered to her. 

Keep going. Don’t let her find you.

She walked until the creek dried up and the trees became so close together that they formed a canopy above her.

But she could not walk forever and she eventually lay on the dreamlike soft grass and dozed off.

She heard voices whispering around her, bell-like and light like a firefly’s gentle glow. Everything felt warm and fuzzy. She snuggled in closer to something that seemed to envelope her in that welcoming sleepy feeling.

When the girl awoke, the first thing she saw was the beautiful sky. There were so many stars. And she could see the pale milky blue trails of something magical in the deep, deep blue above. The sky had never looked so wonderful back home, always coated with thick smog and overpowered by the streetlamps.

The next thing she noticed was the green blanket wrapped around her. In all meanings of the word, it simply looked like the kind of moss you’d find on a rock whilst hiking. But it was so soft and warm and she couldn’t help but sink herself deeper into the blanket.

She spotted the creature finally, perched on a rock by the nearby pond. The pond held the same shape as the creek back home, but the water remained stagnant. Under different circumstances she would’ve been terrified of the creature. It took on a humanoid figure, but it was far too tall and its angles twisted in all the wrong places.

This was a girl who read more fairytales than her mother read the daily news. She should’ve been scared, but she was inexplicably drawn to the bluish glow of the creature and the way its long hair sparkled.

“Are you a fairy?” she asked. “A witch? A princess?”

The creature turned its face to her and reality ceased to exist when she got lost in the swirling doe eyes that met hers.

The creature grinned. Not maliciously, but far too wide to be innocent. The tilt of its head was so slight, it might never have even happened.

She was just a lonely girl. Any smile in her direction was friendly.

When the creature stood to its full height and approached the girl she was forced to crane her neck to see. Then it knelt down again and asked in a smooth, bell-like voice, “Can I have your name?”

—

There are tales of a wanderer. She goes by many titles, Star Traveller, Lost Princess. It’s impossible to know if you’ll ever get the chance to meet her yourself, but everybody knows somebody who, at some point or another, crossed paths with her.

You may get to hear an unworldly story from her, but she may ask if she could have your name.

She can never stay for long, for she knows too much and something is always watching.

She often travels with a story-weaver, too tall to be human, but when witnesses try to recall the face of her companion, their memories seem to be lost in a misty haze.

If you ask her why she and the weaver travel and if either will ever settle down, she’ll tell you she can not. She wishes to save the worlds.

“Save the worlds from what?”

“People are forgetting,” she’ll tell you, voice barely above a whisper. “And once we forget, nothing will stop our worlds from unraveling.”

Perhaps, she merely is a lost soul with titles too big for her scrawny figure.

For how could she possibly save the worlds when she can’t even recall her own name?