Lily

The Healer, created and posted on DeviantArt by *Ipeters

The hummingbird hung, suspended upside-down in the air by an invisible force. It lay motionless. Dead.

Lily had found the lifeless bird, as red as blood, on her daily walk through the forest on the eastern edge of the orphanage grounds. The composition of the bird on its green deathbed was a beautiful contrast in Lily’s color-blind eyes. The growing fingers of life curling up over the corpse, engulfing the spirit-abandoned husk, was beauty in itself.

She had knelt down near the bird, and had hovered her left hand over the limp creature. Lily had wriggled her fingers, and like a marionette on invisible strings, the bird’s whole body had moved with them. Lily had gently raised her arm higher, lifting the bird off the ground. Without even touching the hummingbird, Lily had then used the palm of her right hand to pull it into a more centered position in front of her.

With her mind, Lily now rotated the bird left, right, up and down, serenely inspecting every centimeter of the bird’s body. The tail feathers looked fine, as did its feet and breast. The right wing had a slight ruffle, and an abnormal bulge protruded from the left side of the neck. She deduced that the poor thing must have crashed into a tree.

Moving the bird onto its back, Lily stared into the birds eyes. The shimmer and glow that one finds in the eyes of even the ugliest or meanest of creatures was not present here. The black surfaces now resembled the shells of a curled up bug more than the receptacles of light they had once been.

Many people throughout Lily’s life had commented on her own beautiful blue-grey eyes, saying that they were the windows to the soul. The phrase had troubled Lily on numerous occasions. If this was true, then would seeing the world in shades of grey mean that her soul was cursed? The concept had depressed the girl. One day, when she realized the truth of this phrase, she decided to come to terms with her imperfections.

The others around her thought the words were metaphorical. You couldn’t actually see a soul, let alone view it through two magical looking glasses that some divine being had plastered on every face. What an absurd idea!

It wasn’t absurd to Lily though. Maybe they couldn’t see the individual and unique lifeforms that inhabited each and every creature, but Lily could. Her inability to see yellows and browns hadn’t been a curse after all. Instead, it had been a silly superficial sacrifice for a better cause. Lily could see someone’s soul. She could look into their eyes, dead or alive, and feel the state of their aura; their consciousness. She could feel their happiness, their pain, their guilt; however, the details behind each emotion still remained a secret. She couldn’t see people’s pasts or read their thoughts, but if one of the orphans had stolen a cookie, Lily could figure out who the culprit was.

Nobody knew that Lily had these experiences, and that was fine with her. She would never tell anyone about her gifts. If she had learned anything from massaging others’ minds, it was that people didn’t like things that were ‘different’. The world wasn’t ready for her, and she didn’t know if it ever would be.

A few years after Lily had learned of her abilities, she discovered one extra trick.

She focused on the hummingbird, grasping around in its dark eyes with her mind. The object she longed to find should still be here, but Lily was having a hard time finding it. How long ago had the bird died? She pushed harder and delved deeper into the abyss. Nothing.

Just as Lily was about to give up, she noticed a very heavy sensation upon her chest. Her breathing slowed down, not out of choice, but because her lungs started to feel burdened by something, like they were caught in an ever-tightening clamp. Lily recognized the emotions. Sadness. Embarrassment. Regret.

She had found it. The bird’s soul was now intertwined with her own. She was going to be successful.

Lily started the process. Her body started to convulse in large drawn-out pulses, but Lily was able to keep control. She kept her eyes locked onto the bird’s soul as her head tilted to the left, then to the right. In a final pulse, the invisible strings were cut, and the bird fell back to the earth. Just as she had experienced before, her eye-sight diminished. Everything became a thick blur of grey. Not one thing could be distinguished from another; Lily was as good as blind.

She steadied herself, trying not to fall to one side. She knew that it wouldn’t last for very long, it never did, although it seemed to take longer and longer to recover each time. Lily closed her eyes as she waited, paying more attention to the sounds of the world around her and the feel of the dirt on her fingers.

There was a rustle in the grass before her. It had worked. She heard the buzz of the hummingbird’s wings as they started to flap once again. For a second she believed it hovered right in front of her, saying thank you. The weight on her lungs lifted, and her head became light. Joy. Rediscovery. Grace.

The hummingbird flew away.

When Lily opened her eyes, for a brief moment she could make out the purplish-red of the flowers around her, but it quickly diluted back to the grey world Lily had grown accustomed to.

A bell rang in the distance.

Time to go back.

–Lily, inspired by the digital art ‘The Healer’, created and posted on DeviantArt by *Ipeters

~ by Robbie on July 25, 2009.