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+--- Thread: Blue as an Ibizan Sky (/showthread.php?tid=11465)
Blue as an Ibizan Sky - Eppy - 08-21-2008
A young girl, five years old, kneeled with her hands pressed to her eyes, sobbing in the tomato garden, blood dripping off of two puncture holes in her left foot. Physically she wasn't a run-of-the-mill Maltese child; she was quite pale, almost snow-white, with piercing red eyes and powder-blue hair dropping down to her shoulders, where it curled slightly. The Cardamine latent in the soil did strange things to people's genes, and little Maria was a rather aesthetically pleasing hyperbole of that trend.
Her appearance wasn't particularly important to her at the moment, though; she was too young to care that much about it, but primarily because there were two bleeding holes on her foot, left by a garter snake she'd accidentally stepped on while she was watering her little patch of vegetables in her grandfather's tomato garden. The tin can lay off to the side of the dirt path, leaking its contents into the soil; her straw hat had been knocked away when she fell, and the hem of her yellow sundress ripped up to the waist. The snake had scurried off into the Roma patch.
She sobbed on, wishing somebody would come; she lived with her grandmother, who was at the time away on a trip to Lake Ravenglass, not that her grandma ever payed her any attention; that left her in the little cottage on the outskirts of the Bonello plantation essentially alone. Nobody ever came when she cried, even though she knew deep down in her that her behavior and the trauma it was caused by should bring a reaction; there was nobody to come, and even if there were nobody would want to. On the rare occasions her parents came (even rarer they both came at once) they simply put her out of the house and discussed productivity figures with Grandma. Why was beyond her, Grandma didn't have anything to do with the Cardamine, she was just an old woman with nothing better to do than watch Detergent Operas on the Holovision.
She didn't have any friends to speak of that might come, either, that was for certain. There was nobody for miles, and she only got to see her cousins once or twice a month when they came over to visit Grandma. Not that she'd want them to come, all they'd do is laugh and go back to playing tag, or whatever stupid game they'd come up with that week.
Contemplating this, still sniffling, Maria hauled herself up and lifted her hat half-heartedly back onto her head, trudging back to the cottage to wash her snake bite. She knew it wasn't venomous, all of those snakes had been exterminated years ago, but it stung and it was bleeding; she ran it under the bathroom sink for a few minutes, then applied the antibiotic like she'd been taught by her Uncle Ramos at last Christmas party. She liked him. He talked to her like she was an equal, not some little doll like her other girl cousins liked to play with. Too bad he never came here; he was always flying starfighters for the Navy.
She finished wrapping gauze around the snake bite.
"All done," she said to no one in particular, and hopped down off the counter, sliding her way into her room, where she promptly sat down at her Neural Net terminal and began to scan the news. It was something to do, at least; she didn't want to go out into the garden for a few days.