Prologue

On nights where I can't seem to close my eyes for more than five minutes and just sleep, I resort to telling myself a story. On rare occasions, I'll revisit memories. Usually, I'll make up a scene and import some characters (without faces - just dark figures moving around and talking - it's also how I imagine scenes in a book). My friends from Creative Writing think it's strange. Pfffffft it's not that weird. *Ahem hem cough cough* anywayyy last night I imagined a mother holding a crying infant in a spacious garden filled with flowers and other plants. And then an airplane crashing into a mountain. I'll try to connect those events - it's not too hard, I guess - in ANOTHER PAM HARPER SHORT YAYYYY

~*~

After enduring the drought for four months, the garden's rusty plants finally broke down and entered a state of depression. The clouds and their rain had left them for another country, where the native flowers and leaves weren't as clingy as the ivy vines, which extended its tentacles everywhere. They smothered a poor wall of cinder blocks, determined to consume as much rain as possible. Children once bouced tennis balls against that wall, trying and failing to catch those giant, abnormally colored peas. One boy, the oldest, finally caught his ball on the day the movers came with their bulky arms and bulky truck. He caught it several more times before his mother dragged him over to the van and drove away. Cinderella, the name that was given to the wall by the youngest child, never experienced such feelings of belonging again. There was that time when an owner planted a dozen baby vines next to it, and Cinderella had rejoyced for a moment, because - company! and babies! - she'd would finally belong, as a mother this time, not a vertical trampoline. However, she soon realized that a wall could never raise a plant. Without arms, she couldn't feed or comfort her children when they cried, and she had no way of reaching the plant food just ten feet away. The only thing she could ever do was give support, unwavering support, for her children as they grew higher and higher and higher, until their greedy leaves concealed her face from the sun, which had been her only friend for several decades. When the owner came to take down those yellow vines, as they had been sucking up a majority of the ground's water, Cinderella was confused to find that she was a different person than before, and the current fashion had changed drastically. Where were the big, flouncy dresses? The short, wavy hair? The pearl necklaces? The parasols? Now women were wearing pants, and the little ones were wearing "jeans" that were way too revealing. Girls had black powder and what looked like permanent marker around their eyes, as if they were undead. Yes, Cinderella knew about zombies. She knew a lot about the world, except for what it looked like right now. But she intended to find out.

A couple of years passed, and the owners gave birth to a baby girl. They alternated between calling her Pam, Ella, and Pamela. The wall longed to hold her, because she felt that Ella was a part of her, but who would have the freedom to visit the world and experience everything for herself. Cinderella began to think of herself as Ella's godmother. Her fairy godmother. And she decided that pretending to be magical would be much better for her self esteem than being named after her looks.

That night, Pam woke up in a fit of tears because she didn't know what the soft pitter patter outside was. She refused to calm down when the owners - Samantha and John Harper - hushed her gently, and cried even more when they shook a rattle in front of her face. Samantha, always the one to think of creative solutions, brought Ella outside to look at the rain, with an umbrella of course, and the tears instantly stopped making crooked tracks down her soft baby skin. She reached out of the umbrella to touch a drop and squealed. She touched another one and patted her mom's face with her wet hand. Samantha made a face, and Ella squealed again. This continued for a while until the soft sounds on the waterproof material overhead lulled the baby to sleep.

Every time it rained outside, Ella would stare out of windows and glass doors until her attention became focused entirely on food. After learning how to crawl, she would smush her face against the front door and watch her neighbors play in the rain. When she managed to take her first steps, she stumbled over to her parents, fell on top of them, and uttered her first words. "Mommaa. Dadaa. Waain owwsiide."

On a rainy day, Samantha and John boarded a plane to Malaysia because a distant relative had passed away, and they felt obliged to attend his funeral because he had invited them over for Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago. The pilot hadn't known that his grape juice was actually wine. The flight attendants had no idea someone had a bomb in their carry on. All two hundred passengers died when the plane crashed. The people near the smelly toilets almost made it with only a few scratches, but died while attempting to travel down the snow covered mountain. If yetis did exist, half their population would've suffered from a massive avalanche, which buried a nearby village of five hundred people. No one knew exactly what had happened, but assumptions were made. Physicists and detectives joined together on the hunt for the truth.

Although they found almost the whole story behind the crash, Pam never discovered the connection between rain and her parents' death, since her aunt was always too drunk to formulate words properly. Samantha's death was the main cause of her drinking. For years, she had depended on Sam for everything - company, advice, friendship, sympathy. Alcohol was her only friend left.

Pam continued to rejoice the rainy days in her aunt's town, which was pretty much every day, but she felt unexplainably somber each time she heard soft pitter patters on her birthday, the day her parents passed away.

~*~

I know I forgot about the garden. I didn't really feel like describing multiple plant species, so I used the cinder block wall instead. It took me around 2 1/2 hours to write this gahhhhhh whyyyy so much time wasted

#PamelaHarper