Marie E-Book

Hunter Lassal

• Herausgeber: LegendaryMedia
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Die 3 Augen der Meerjungfrauen
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 102

Beschreibung

A tale of hope, fear, joy, and love. A whispered song about sacrifice and devotion. The sweet dream of becoming a ballerina helps the forever ill 10 year old Marie to cope with her fate. This all changes when she hears the tale of a mermaid and her magical shell – a shell that is an Eye into the future, and that could show Marie the path to salvation, or doom. A dangerous chain of events leads to the question of what really matters in our lives — only, possibly, too late for Marie. Will she find her answers in time to save herself? A series of stories about responsibility and the understanding that there might exist dimensions beyond this one, joined to our world by similar hopes and fears, by similar longings for happiness and love, while inflicted by the same blindness that makes us all search beyond the horizon, while salvation looks us in the eye. Age: 9+

Leseprobe

Marie

The Mystery of the Mermaids’ Eyes

Hunter Lassal

Text Copyright © 2012 Lassal, www.lassal.com

Cover Design Copyright © 2012 Lassal, www.lassalmedia.com

Production Copyright © 2012, 2021 LegendaryMedia,

www.legendarymedia.de

eISBN 978-3-86469-036-5

Paperback ISBN 978-3-86469-037-2

Hardcover ISBN 978-3-86469-039-6

Bibliographic information of the German National Library:

The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at dnb.dnb.de.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

LegendaryMedia e.K.

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Germany

www.legendarymedia.de

For Carlotta

Contents

The Nightmare

Marie

The Lost Bird

The Little Ballerina

The Island

Marie Awakens

The Tulle Dress

Visitig Grandpa Thunder

A Mermaids’ Eye

Marie’s Vision

The Letter

Upset

The Storm Tide

After the Storm

More Books by Lassal

The Nightmare

In the darkness, the water rose. The cold crawled up her shivering body, soaking her thin nightgown, pressing it mercilessly against her skin. Beneath her, in the water, the fabric billowed and blew, and the tiny, printed goldfish appeared to come to life to check on whoever had just dared to enter their icy realm. Glowing fish they were, with fins of burning, translucent fabric in the black water that now reached up to the girl’s waist. Marie turned and squinted to see, but it proved useless. Everything above the silvery surface of the water seemed as black as the deepest sadness.

Looking down at herself, Marie saw nothing but a body so white and translucent, it seemed no longer of this world but already part of the water.

There was nothing to hold on to. But even if there had been, it would have proven of little use, weak as she was. Marie knew that. But she also knew that all of this was nothing more than a bad dream. That she was not standing in the water but lying in her sickbed. That the cold was nothing but loneliness and fear and that the small goldfish, dancing around her, were but the pattern of her nightgown.

She had this nightmare every night. And it never ceased to terrify her.

Marie was different from other children. Her arms were weak. Her legs, long and straight, looked so much thinner than the legs of other kids who spent their days running in the garden, playing hide-and-seek, or riding bicycles with their parents. According to her doctors, Marie was not allowed to run, to play hide-and-seek, or to ride a bike. Marie had to lie in bed. Always.

Marie

Marie was born almost exactly eleven years ago in a small hospital not far from the tiny apartment in which she now lived with her parents.

Her birth had been somewhat unusual and thus a story often told. Unlike other babies, Marie was born with her eyes wide open. Not just open, no. Her eyes—green with tiny orange sparks—contemplated her surroundings with unwavering curiosity and seemingly perfect understanding.

The doctors and nurses were so spellbound and awestruck, they only noticed that the tiny girl was neither screaming nor even breathing when her skin began turning a scary shade of blue. Instantly they snapped back into awareness, shouting and running, probing and testing, only to finally connect the small body to the machines that would, from then on and for many years to come, fill her weak lungs with air.

Her mother cried when she was not allowed to hold her baby, when the infant was taken from her to have cold and blinking machines plugged into her, placed in a glass box, and removed from her touch. That was the first day her mother had cried because of Marie. Since then, almost exactly eleven years ago, she has cried almost every day.

So it happened that the machines became Marie’s constant companions. Their tubes hugged her in a soft embrace when she was in pain, and when she could not sleep, the small blinking lights of the colorful displays consoled her. Marie confided everything to her companions, the machines, all her dreams and thoughts—the nice ones as well as the not-so-nice ones. And while listening to the rhythmic sounds of her artificial lungs, the seconds passed, and the minutes, the days, the years.

The Lost Bird

To the doctors’ general astonishment and against all their educated expectations, Marie’s condition had improved slightly throughout the years, enough to take her off the respirators for a couple of hours during the daytime. Enough to have the machines just sitting by her bed in case of an emergency. And, yes, whenever she lay more than merely quietly in bed, emergencies did, in fact, happen.

Marie remembered uncomfortably well the last time an emergency had occurred, which had been only a few weeks earlier. A young bird had flown through the half-open window of her bedroom but was unable to find its way out again. In panic, the small creature fluttered through the dark room, bumping into walls and ceiling until it became hopelessly entangled in the cables and tubes of Marie’s machines. It peeped and twitched trying to free itself from the mess until it collided, with a loud and unhealthy hollow sound, with the closet door mirror.

It fell to the wooden floorboards and lay there unconscious for a while—a small lump of brownish feathers. Marie agonized that it might have hurt itself badly, but after a couple of frightening heartbeats, the young bird got onto its frail-looking legs, shook its tiny head with the ruffled feathers, stretched its fragile wings, and went on to look for a way to escape the darkness of the room.

The moment the bird had flown into her room, Marie had jumped out of her bed in surprise—something she should not have done. When the poor creature smashed into the cabinet door, Marie let out a shocked cry—which she should not have done either. And when the little thing landed on the floor, unconscious, Marie hastened over to it, which was definitely the last thing she should have done, considering the state of her own health.

Before she was even halfway across her room, she collapsed.

The only sound that could be heard was the muffled thump as her knees and hands hit the floor. Nothing came from her mouth, which was stretched wide open in search for air. Like a fish on dry land, she attempted to gulp it down in large swallows, but it did not help. She clutched her neck in desperation, her eyes wide and full of panic.

At that exact moment, her mother burst into the room, alarmed by Marie’s earlier cry and the uncommon noises. Finding her little girl half-suffocated on the floor, she seized her with one arm, while the other was already hitting the big, bright-orange emergency button of the nearby machine and reaching for the respiratory mask.

As soon as the saving air entered her lungs, Marie’s body relaxed in her mother’s arms. And she cried a little. They both cried, sitting on the floor, hugging each other. Each one happy that the other one was there.

In the meantime, the little bird had found the window. Sitting on the windowsill, it watched Marie’s struggles with apparent curiosity as if wondering if the girl was possibly trying to find her way out of the room, just as it had. It chirped loudly, as if to encourage her and to point her in the right direction, then, as she was not coming, it spread its wings and flew off alone into its newfound freedom.

The next day, Marie’s father went to get large stickers to warn inattentive birds of the hazard of open and closed windows. He did not buy bird silhouettes, though, like other people do. Marie’s father bought the silhouettes of goldfish instead.

The Little Ballerina

Many years ago, in an effort to make Marie’s sickroom appear less somber and gloomy, her mother had started to turn pieces of leftover fabric into extravagant bows: huge and small ones, blue ones with yellow dots and fiery red ones that shimmered silvery in the sunlight.

Apart from the bows, there was very little color in Marie’s room. There was, however, a small nightstand sitting on the right at the head of her bed—a present from her father. He had found the dilapidated piece of furniture in a garage sale and had carefully painted it over in several shades of algae-green with huge white starfishes and tiny orange goldfish populating the colored surface.

“Like your eyes, when they shine,” her father used to say, winking. He often mentioned that her greenish eyes with their orange-colored speckles reminded him of goldfish in a dark forest pond.

On the nightstand stood a brown flask containing the bitter medicine that Marie had to swallow three times a day. It was not something she ever looked forward to, but she did it without complaining. There was another object on the nightstand besides the medicine, and that was a small, silvery box with an artfully arched lid. It was, to be precise, a valuable old music box made out of silver with elaborate, shimmering white mother-of-pearl inlays. The box was not larger than two packages of butter stacked on top of each other; but, small as it was, when sunbeams touched its surface, it filled the whole room with innumerable tiny rainbow-like lights. Her father calls them prismatic effects. Each time he saw the rainbows, he would shake his head in wonder and inspect the mother-of-pearl, because, as he would say, you normally need crystals to do this to sunlight. Marie did not mind. To her it looked like magic when the little specks of rainbow danced around on the walls and ceiling, and she loved it.

On the front side of the box, just below the lid, there was a slender silver button. If you pressed it, you would feel rather than hear a soft click, and the lid would be unlocked. If you then opened it, you could hear faint music. It was a sound so slight and so distant, as if it had travelled from a very faraway place, rendering it exhausted and infinitely tired from the long journey.

In the center of the open music box, on a whitish round plate, a tiny ballerina turned to the melody. She was made of porcelain and wore a slightly dusty cream-colored tutu and delicate pointe shoes. She looked so elegant, balancing on her left leg, the tip of her right shoe all but touching her calf; it was like the most gracious movement, had it actually been one. Her arms seemed to be flowing all around her slightly bent head with the dark-brown topknot, which was adorned with fragile ornaments of delicate seashells. Unfortunately, they were missing their larger central piece, which, at one point, must have fallen off and gotten lost. Marie had checked, and it was not in the box. The ballerina’s painted eyes were closed, her red mouth smiled slightly. She appeared to be sleeping while turning slowly to the melody on her tiny stage of silver, porcelain, and mother-of-pearl.

This music box with the little ballerina was Marie’s pride and joy. Her parents had found it at a flea market and given it to her on her last birthday, almost a year ago to the day. It had been in a white cardboard box with an enormous silver ribbon attached to it. It was the most beautiful birthday present that Marie had ever received. Never before had she seen anything so enchanting as this delicate figure, endlessly dancing her perfect rounds, with her mouth ever smiling and her eyes ever closed, like in a never-ending happy dream.

From that day on, there was nothing that Marie desired more than to become a ballerina herself, to wear a cream-colored tutu and fine pointe shoes, and to feel her long brown locks flying about her while she whirled around in endless pirouettes watching the world stream by. And she dreamt that her mother and her father would be watching and that they would laugh and be happy again.