T
here were so many ways Elli was different from her mother, the way her mind spun outward, soaking in the galaxies and floating amongst them, her dreams and thoughts melding with the worlds beyond their own. It is why she is on the island and her mother is not. Elli’s head is more or less in the clouds, those blue eyes transfixed on day dreams. She finds herself counting her steps as she walks on the island. It is much easier to stare down at her feet than to look into the faces of the statues that have ghosts flittering behind them, begging to be set free. She has counted her steps before. How many it took to get from her cottage door to the cliff side. How many it took to go from the sweets cart and into her favorite tea shop in Night Court. She doesn't remember how many steps she ran after that white raven until she lost sight of him.
She is not the only one that was one of the first. For Elliana sits on that island waiting. Ask her what she is waiting for and she would say nothing, but the look in those blue eyes tell you it is for something after all, she just wont tell you what.
The sound of the song is what draws her over to the girl and her statue. (She ignores the one she passes that looks like a ghost that visited her late in the evening last night, but she gets a chill anyway that flitters down her spine like ripples in a puddle.) But another finds her, blocks her path and the statue smiles at her and Elli asks it: “Fawn?” She stares as the statue smiles shyly. “I thought you drowned?” She asks it, because she knows the story of her great-great-grandmother. And is if it only needed that word, as if it were waiting for Elli to say such a thing, water spills out her mouth and the statue is still once more. She brushes her shoulder against the thing, still as stone, as she passes, a silent ‘I love you’ there is her touch.
“You learned their magic,” she says in awe as she approaches the girl, the unicorn. A smile flourishes from beneath blue eyes. Elliana comes beside the statue and rests her head on the other shoulder. “I have yet to hear one sing though,” she admits with concentrated eyes as the song of the statue dies. “What should we sing next?” She asks as if she has known the girl for centuries, and maybe, on this island, through the eternal eyes of its statues—they have. “You start, and I will follow.” Because little ghost girls were never meant to orchestrate things, they were always meant to be the ones to find the harmony, amongst both the living and the dead.
some are ghosts before they are dead.
