Where the Girl is

The girl’s feet are bare. It’s forty degrees, but that doesn’t matter. It’s warm where she is. The girl has a name: Harper. It’s a good name, common. She shares it with several other girls in her class. But the girl has another name, a secret name—one only she knows how to pronounce—that she won’t share with anyone. The secret name is the one she uses when she’s in the other place, and since she’s in the other place now, we’ll just keep calling her the girl, not Harper.

You thought the girl was here, with us, at the park, walking on the cold pavement with bare feet? No, she’s not here. I’ll explain.

Where the girl is, it’s summer. She stands in a field near a lake. Flowers blanket the field, protecting everything underneath—a canopy. She learned this word recently. The flowers are a canopy, protecting all the small bugs and critters that live below. She can hear them buzzing, chirping, and clicking like an orchestra the moment before the house lights dim.

She looks down at her feet and wiggles her toes. In this place, she has no use for shoes. She has no use for so many of the things her parents insist she needs back home. Usually, she humors them. But not today.

“Shoes!” they call after her now, from somewhere far away. But she does not need shoes because it is warm! They don’t understand.

She runs to the edge of the lake. The water is clear all the way through and she can see the many pink crystals that make up the floor, like strawberry rock candy—her favorite. She she sits by the edge of the water, closes her eyes, and tilts her head back to soak up the sun. She wishes she could stay here forever.

In this place, the possibilities are endless. She has danced on cotton candy clouds and swam with a giant squid. She has ridden off into the sunset on horseback and hiked through forests of giant purple mushrooms. She has been a warrior, a scientist, an author, and an architect in this place—sometimes all at once.

We watch the barefoot girl lean down to the earth and whisper to something only she can see. We wish we could go to the other place with her, wish she would show it to us, and also, we hope that she never does, because it’s hers and we don’t belong there.

Years later, the girl will be called a dreamer, a star-gazer, a storyteller, and a writer. She will also be called naive and unrealistic. She’ll be told to “get her head out of the clouds” on more than one occasion, and, on one occasion, to get her “fucking shit together,” by a man she will date, but not for much longer. After that, she’ll only date women.

She will be told that she can do anything she sets her mind to, and also, that she will never make it. She will be told that her hard work will pay off and also that the system is rigged, but not in her favor.

At some point, she will stop dreaming, because everything feels impossible. She will get a boring job that pays her bills. She’ll stop eating meat to save the planet, then start eating meat again because she is selfish, then stop eating dairy because it makes her stomach hurt. In her limited free time, between work and avoiding going to the gym, she’ll try to learn how to play the guitar. She’ll decide she hates the guitar and sell the damn thing. She also hates the gym. She’ll read news articles about how the planet is dying and soon we won’t have a planet at all because we’re killing it. She’ll stop eating meat again. She’ll go through a painful breakup and move halfway across the country. Her parents will die, one by cancer and the other by heart attack. She’ll move back home to clean out their things and regret not having spent more time with them. Then, she will start dreaming again, because everything feels impossible.

But these things won’t come until much later. Right now, the barefoot girl is happy in the other place, oblivious to the cold, her imagination running wild and free, and that’s really all we need to know.

If you made it to the end of this story, thank you for sticking around. I didn’t initially plan to share short stories here, but I thought it might be a fun break from talking about my query process. I wrote “Where the Girl is” in January, for a writing class I took at Portland Community College, as an exercise in character study. If I could spend my entire life in school, taking every art and English class available, I would. Unfortunately, I do have to pay rent.

Until next time!