Stacy--Part Twenty-Three

Splog # 84

Twenty-Three

   At first, she couldn't see much of anything. She was flying through darkness with only the pale sweep of white wings slowly rising and falling on either side of her. The sensation was quite pleasant - the smooth ride that wasn't quite even but felt like she was gently rolling along over hills that rose and fell ever so slightly beneath her. The cool breeze of the lightly flapping wings at her sides. Again, she let her eyes close and her body sway languidly with the motion of her insect steed. Surprisingly, she felt no apprehension about losing her balance and falling. Everything felt just right and there seemed nothing to worry about. The thought occurred to her that she just might open her eyes and find herself sitting in the garden behind her house, swaying forward and backward, and watching a butterfly floating around her instead of herself floating around on a butterfly. She felt a little relieved at this thought but, at the same time, she wasn't sure if she wanted Lane and Johnny and Splog to be just a curious daydream. She pictured the three of them to herself and was amused to find them each appear suffused in a single bright color, sort of like the rocks she had climbed around on earlier in the day, only the colors were not muted and subtle as they had been then. Lane was a vibrant green all over, including her face, arms and hair. Stacy thought she looked like a tall leprechaun. Blue was the color that had painted Johnny. His face looked like the sky at its bluest, with two eyes that were hard to distinguish, except when they blinked. She was shocked to see blue teeth when he smiled at her. Were his eyes really blue, she wondered. She had only seen him at night and had no way of knowing. And here was a resplendent purple Splog. His brown hat and coat and black boots were all purple. He had a big purple smile on his purple face and was playing a purple fiddle with a purple bow in his purple hands. Smiling herself, Stacy held up her hands to see what color they might be.

   Now, Stacy had been looking at Lane and Johnny and Splog in her mind's eye and her physical eyes had been closed. When she held her hands before her face to see what color they might be (if any), she opened her eyes and found quite a change from when she had closed them. Then, there had been darkness all around her. But now - well, the first idea that came to her was that she was flying through a rainbow. Her eyes opened on a flood of purple, just as Splog had been in her imagination. This shortly gave way to blue and then came green and red and orange and yellow. These hues all painted the butterfly she was riding as it passed through each band of color. When the butterfly faded from yellow to white, and Stacy found that she herself had regained her normal fleshy tone, she started to look around to try to make out the landscape that she was flying over.

   The landscape seemed to be pretty flat and lacking in color. The ground wasn't exactly white, but if she wanted to think of it as gray, it would have to be as an extremely pale gray. The sky above her was an unbroken expanse of white and it seemed to her that she had passed through a rainbow and into a land bleached of all color.

   Then, ahead of her, two boxlike structures slowly came into view. They seemed to be gray or brown, some dark color on the light background of the surrounding area. As she got closer, she could see that the boxes were made out of connecting bars. Why, they were cages. Two large cages set side by side some distance apart from each other. And they were not empty. She could make out the shapes of two children inside the cages. A boy in the cage on her left and a girl in the one on her right. They were holding on to the bars and looking up at her. Stacy wanted to stop and let them out but the butterfly just kept flying straight ahead and she didn't know how to make it stop or land or turn around. As they passed beneath her, she glanced back and, in a flash of blue, the little boy turned into Johnny.