What are you doing?" "Ya!" said Jane, whirling around, her hands held up menacingly. It was Mr. Nobley with coat, hat, and cane, watching her with wide eyes. Jane took several quick (but oh so casual) steps away from Martin's window. "Um, did I just say, 'Ya'?" "You just said 'Ya,'" he confirmed. "If I am not mistaken, it was a battle cry, warning that you were about to attack me.I, uh..." She stopped to laugh. "I wasn't aware until this precise and awkward moment that when startled in a startled in a strange place, my instincts would have me pretend to be a ninja.
We found it!" Charlotte yelled, as they ran back through the house. "We found it, we found it!"Eddie, Mr. Mallery, and Colonel Andrews came from separate directions, converging in the front hall. Miss Charming was hopping up and down, her bosom nearly rising to slap her own forehead.
Fortune-teller tea. Give it a sip!"The liquid was pink and smelled of strawberries, but when Maddie drank it, the flavor was deep and a little bitter, followed by a sudden burst of sweetness.Her father returned. "Well?" he asked."It started out as black licorice and then melted into butterscotch," she said."Oh, my girl, the tea is telling you that this is the year to keep your ear to the ground and listen for surprises. Change is coming!"Maddie's stomach was full of thoughts and her head full of butterflies. She checked her watch again. She couldn't wait for it all to begin.
Ashlynn washed her face, put on an apron, and then opened wide the door to her shoe closet. This princess wouldn't care if she wore a burlap sack every day, so long as she had dozens of footwear choices. Today she settled on a pair of scrappy teal wedges and went to start breakfast. Even though her father's grand house came fully stocked with servants, her mother believed in good, solid, character-forming chores. After all, Ashlynn would inherit her mother's story and become the next Cinderella someday, and there would be lots of floors to mop and hearths to sweep her Happily Ever After.
Miri took genuine comfort in studying Mathematics that day. She could sort numbers into two simple ideas: true and not true. Unlike numbers, words were rarely just one thing. They moved and changed, camouflaging and leaping out unexpectedly. Words were slippery and alive; words wrestled out of her grip and became something new. Words were dangerous.
That year, when the trees burned the fire of late summer into their leaves and the ground mist was a ghost of the river, long and wet and cold, the aunt looked from her windows to the walls around her and imagined another winter inside them. She began to see the world as a bird sees bars, and she scratched her arms beneath her sleeves.
The first building she reached appeared to be an old barn. Only one young guard stood before its bolted door, staring at her with wide eyes, holding up his sword in defense, She heated his sword and he dropped it, his expression barely changing, as if he had been expecting that. She held up her two swords to his throat, but they were two heavy, so she dropped one and held the other with both hands. "Where are the two Bayern boys kept?" The soldier shook his head. BURN HIM, prompted the fire. The excitement of burning was simmering in her, heating her up for more action.
In movies, we are accustomed to seeing handsome actors. It's so commonplace on the screen, large or small, that we barely note it as extraordinary. But in life, rarely do we encounter an onslaught of beauty, entire a hive of handsomeness, find ourselves awash in an ocean of attractiveness, drowning in a miasma of hotness.
I let my head fall back, and I gazed into the Eternal Blue Sky. It was morning. Some of the sky was yellow, some the softest blue. One small cloud scuttled along. Strange how everything below can be such death and chaos and pain while above the sky is peace, sweet blue gentleness. I heard a shaman say once, the Ancestors want our souls to be like the blue sky.