Leaves

by Emily D., 16

The autumn leaves tumble down from their lofty perches in silent streams of forgotten joy, lost dreams of dying sunlight, wishes and fishes and nonsense in their spiral paths down, down, down, to strike the ground with disintegrating edges, rotting and molding to the end of in their death-filled life. 

Little feet in colorful shoes trample the leaves as they bounce in the wind, kicking and stomping their ecstatic glee. Attached to wild feet are wilder legs, torsos, then arms, heads, piled high with bright smiles and rosy-red cheeks, all giggles and faces aching with the lovely pain of grinning too wide, too long.

With breaking lungs, they run to and fro, skipping, hopping, running, jumping, laughing, unthinking joy everything, everywhere, all at once, all childhood, all happiness, so overpowering happiness like bright bubbles ballooning unstoppably until-

The pin sticks in the funny floating rubber.

A girl falls to the dirty floor of Earth. Collapses. Agony rears its ugly head when laughter rings, embarrassment like physical pain to match the pain in her side, tears riveting down her face from the moldy boulder stuck in her throat. A chasm yawns its tired mouth so close and all it would take is one roll to fall into the darkness, lost forever. She teeters on the edge when the children laugh with stitches in their side as their leader kicks her school bag, once, to send it flying into the mud.

One innovator grabs a handful of the rotten leaves, throws it in the girl’s hair. The rest follow.

The girl curls into a tight ball, legs and arms tangled up in a confusing mess topped with the dirty fault of autumn’s trees.

“Stop.” A quiet word, whispered to the dark space between her limbs.

No one hears her little plea.

One boy in the crowd watches the leering grins of his friends with eye-darting uncertainty, his gut a twisting mesh of barbed wire. He has never seen this girl before today. He has been friends with these people for too long to remember. What did he owe her anyway? He owed his friends everything, they gave him all the happiness he always wanted, this girl wasn’t anything. The boy grabs a fistful of leaves and stares as they pummel her slightly shaking shoulders.

This girl is nothing to him. But the boy turns away anyway, tight brows and a monster squatting over his heart as he steps, one foot in front of the other, until the shrieks of glee dissipate into smoke behind him.

The girl watches from the gap between her limbs as a boy turns away from the crowd. Her eyes blur for another reason besides the still jeering children, now throwing sticks and rocks to accompany the dead leaves. 

A little creature withers around inside her chest, flopping its newborn head back and forth along her heartstrings to play a few jarring chords.

He turned away. Just like that. He walked away. Why did he walk away, she wonders, why did he do that? 

The girl curls tighter when a large rock hits her spine. That boy left his friends. He left me here. But he left the crowd. The girl watches their faces; the children’s faces who throw sticks and stones at this mirror until it shatters into a void of empty glass.

She wants this to end. Now. Needs it.

“Stop.” A whisper.

“Stop.” Louder.

“Stop!” A shout. The chasm by her side snaps shut.

The shower of sticks and stones and leaves halts, the laughter stalled in surprise.

The girl clambers to her feet to meet the owlish blinking of the shocked children. One girl in a frilly yellow dress turns and scutters away.

“Leave!” The yell startles even the girl. The children scatter like birds erupting from a tree. 

But her momentary flash of courage evaporates with the last colorful sneaker’s disappearance over the hill, and the girl sinks down in a muddy puddle of slowly numbing pain.

She lies down on the dirty Earth and stares blankly, but with growing curiosity, at the open sky. It’s so blue, with clouds dancing in white wedding dresses around silly circles, loops, and spirals. It’s almost beautiful. And so open. How could anything be this infinite? 

She wishes, once, quietly, to herself, to be pulled up there, to be free with all that open world stretching out possibilities for thousands of miles. But then the wish ends and the girl realizes there is only the land and the crusty bones of dead once-green leaves crackling beneath her body, her feet, the children’s feet, and the feet of all the world’s children, grown and ungrown alike.

And the girl watched a tear leap from her eye to snake down and plummet towards the dirt, too late to water the death spread all around her. Too late to save the leaves.

Maryland