chess | ./~ Tell me what you've seen; was it a dream? Was I in it? ~/.

I felt like I needed to write something. So I wrote something. I still have no idea what it is.

It was in the last glow of dawn that I saw her, before the sad glory of the daytime sun had risen behind the ever-present clouds. For a moment, she was a silhouette against the jungle skyline - and then she was gone.

For days, I was haunted by that vision, the wild girl in the trees, alive and free. I tried to imagine what she would look like, what colour her eyes would be, how her matted hair would fall across her bare shoulders. Of course, it was cold enough, these nights, that she wouldn't have bare shoulders, not if all she owned was what she carried and she still survived.

I'd forgotten all about her, of course, when the boy came to the village, downy beard and patched-together clothing with the hides of dead rabbits crudely sewn to cover the gaps. We wanted to send him back to the mainland, figuring he was the son of some tourist who'd come and lost himself in our little paradise, from his white skin and his blue eyes. But that wasn't what he'd come for. He came to look us over, and obviously he found us wanting, because a few weeks later a tourist boat almost ran into a little wooden raft carrying a baby and that girl I had seen once, maybe in a dream.

And that's why your sister is a little strange, Amanda, and prone to running off into the jungle whenever she pleases; her parents live there, so I can hardly stop her, and they've taken her once or twice so she knows where she's going. I still swear that you'd not get three steps before being eaten by something.

Look, I'm sorry about that, and I have told her not to do it again - but I *think* the rabbit's head was a gift, not a warning. And it wasn't as if there was that much blood left on the carpet.