Cry of the Nightingales |
Issue 6
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They came for the dogs and they left with a girl.
It struck me as a sort of cruel twist of fate because I’d recognized her the moment I saw her. I knew that face. But I’d never met this girl before, only her doppelgänger from my hometown. The girl I knew, the one from home, used to look up to me. She used to ask my advice about boys and school and theatre. She even called me her sister once, in a letter she wrote me. Her name was Ashley, and at the time I saw her double, I didn’t know if Ashley was doing okay. Last I saw her, she was in a bad relationship with an older boy who was in love with some other girl he used to date and always talked down to her. Last we spoke, she asked me if she should leave him. There’s a heavy responsibility that comes with being someone’s older sibling, and I had never realized this until I was one, until I had failed at being one. I told her she should give him a chance. Because I knew him too—he was my friend—and I didn’t want to believe that he was a bad person. I should’ve been looking out for her best interests, but I was a kid too and I didn’t understand that people could be both good and bad, that not everything was black and white, that he could hurt her and be nice to me. I never imagined that the ghost of her would haunt me more than that decision ever did. I met her double on a Sunday afternoon, after I had just come back from the schoolhouse. I’d been looking for a lost book (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; this one wasn’t even mine, I’d borrowed it from a friend), and when I opened the door, one of the staff members told me a new girl had arrived. She stomped up the stairs from the offices, sunlight catching on strands of her dark auburn hair, and I froze where I stood. She couldn’t be here. It wasn’t possible. This was a place where bad kids went, a place where parents sent their rebellious children. Not nice girls like Ashley. Dread pooled in my stomach at the glare on her face. She looked exactly like her, but it was obvious she’d changed. Her edges seemed rougher, eyes harder, shoulders tenser than I’d ever seen them. I remember thinking, You cannot be her, and then, after a moment, This is my fault. Somehow, in my addled mind, I thought my misguidance must’ve led to her downfall. A million questions bubbled up in my throat, scraping at my lips: I wanted to ask what she was doing here, what happened to her, if she was here because of me. Instead, I clamped my mouth shut and scrutinized her as she crossed her arms and leaned against the kitchen counter in a rather aggressive attempt at looking bored. Her glare pierced straight through my armored walls. I felt the faint tremor in my hands start up, and I folded them into my pockets to keep from looking too affected. It took me a few moments of staring to realize that her jagged glances were not directed my way, and that through her hostile front, there was no recognition in her eyes as they swept over me. “This is Julie,” said one of the administrators who had followed her up the stairs (though at a much calmer pace). With that revelation, I suddenly saw the differences: she was taller than the girl I knew, her hair redder, her face a finger thinner, and her eyes—her eyes were what sold me. They were slanted upwards just slightly on the outside corners. That couldn’t be passed off by lighting or aging. I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t Ashley in this awful place, but the girl in front of me lit my nerve-ends on fire. Run, they screamed, and don’t look back. The five months she lived there, I kept my distance. As all human beings are plagued by an itch to believe in superstition, I felt an aversion to her. She was an omen, and I was wary to find out of what. |
MALIA WESSEL won 1st Place of the Non-Fiction Writing Contest. Malia is a recent graduate of the University of East Anglia in England with a Masters in Theatre Directing; they also studied with the Creative Writing: Playwriting and Screenwriting department there. Their first play, Tony the Fantastic Fireman! LIVE: One Show Only was produced at their undergrad University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and nominated for the John Cauble Award for Outstanding One-Act Play at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.
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