Character Exploration #10

She didn’t remember the first few months. Her hands were so small and clunky. She could’ve sworn things were different, somehow, maybe before. Veera stripped her master’s bed of its sheets, gathered dirty clothes strewn around the room, and tucked away stray sandals to lie in pairs beside the mattress. Everything was a chore, stretching her short limbs taut while she struggled carrying heavy laundry baskets outside, where a large basin sat filled with water and sand.

While she scrubbed and rinsed the clothes one at a time before hanging them on a line just outside their home, her arms ached, and she stood on tip toes to clip the cotton into the wire, and she was so small. And besides, the clothes didn’t come out smelling or looking any better in the water than they did before, even if it’s what her master told her to do.

When laundry was done, she went out to collect plants from around the city, as instructed. Her feet burned from the hot desert dirt and bled, caught by stray thorns. Still, she uprooted tiny yellow flowers, pulled at weathered fruit from barrel cacti, and picked large oval-shaped leaves. Veera couldn’t name a single one, didn’t know if it’s any of what her master wanted, and somehow the whole task seemed… lonely. She kept looking over her shoulder, as if waiting for something to happen. Trees swayed in the breeze, bitty desert mice scurried across the underbrush, but still something was missing.

Veera couldn’t remember first opening her eyes, taking in the world. Blyssung, her master, said something later about how they found her out there in the desert, took her in, and how fortunate she was to be found in time. When she asked why they were out there, they explained someone got lost out there, and they’d been looking for her ever since. She scanned the horizon, at the flat land stretching for miles until, in every direction, large purple mountains loomed up in the distance.

Sometimes, she talked to the others. They looked a little like her, but sometimes had beaks for mouths, claws for hands and feet, and always feathers sprouting along their back. She too had soft down prickling beneath her shoulder blades, which itched and ached when first coming in, but by then, she had gotten used to it. These others, these ones who weren’t their masters, they did not take well to her. She was the youngest, a tiny fledgling, Blyssung sometimes cooed, and perhaps, she thought, that was why.

They griped and groaned about their chores, their masters, and sometimes about one another when they weren’t around. While some didn’t like others for past spats, everyone came to the consensus about one. The traitor. They never called her by name, or mentioned what they did, but Veera sometimes heard them curse under their breaths about her, about how she took the easy way out and disappeared.

And even if Veera didn’t know, didn’t remember anything, she thought sometimes, she must have hated her too.