The Puddle

"Why don't you two go play out in the rain?" a mother asked her two daughters. Both were sitting idly and terribly bored on a bed that wasn't theirs in a room that wasn't theirs. They did not yet have a home. One of them had straight hair, the other had sweet curls. Both were brunette. "Alright, come on," the straight haired girl said, calling to her sister. They bundled up significantly for the rainy weather, perhaps overdressing a little in case of a better adventure than simply wandering outside the road of a hotel.

Heavy raindrops slashed against their faces as they made their way down, down, down the stairs and out onto the blacktop. The rain made the boring asphalt look like onyx or black diamond as it sparkled beneath the sheen of rain. The blacktop road had plenty of dips and curves in it so that it was a land-mine of puddles. Racing from one puddle to the next, the girls began to tire themselves but were not tired enough to retreat back into their hotel room and back to boredom.. They would much rather be tired and wet than bored. Rain had ceased to fall, causing the blacktop to look like dark iceThe straight haired girl continued walking a few paces until she came upon a very large puddle, almost a small pond, that they had not yet come across. Her younger sister squatted down on her heels and drove a leaf through a smaller puddle back and forth, watching the rivulets shimmer and make wakes over the leaf's shoulder.

Gazing deep into the pool of water, the straighted hair girl saw her reflection. It was a perfect outdoor mirror. But then it changed to an almost real little girl looking up at her from under the water. Was there a little girl there? Was there someone else? The straight hair girl wrestled with the thought of touching the water, of moving its surface. To undo the quiet stillness of that pond may forever drain that world of its existence. If she touched it, and nothing was there... she didn't wish to think of it, now that she saw the excited face gazing up at her, just as she gazed down. The reflections in the water were perfect. The trees quivered and shook in the wind and the white from the sky was in the pond. Oh what if I, thought the little girl, could fall into that lovely bit of sky, right through the pavement! What if I found a whole new place under my shoes, but way up in the sky at the same time? She did not formulate so many words, but her heart was thinking it. The temptation was too much. She gathered up herself, feeling as though she were about to jump through a magic painting. Her head told her, just you wait! You're going to get your feet all wet and jump into a puddle that's all. She screwed up her courage and with one last look of the downy, white heavens rushing through the trees and playing songs with the wind and the waters she closed her eyes and jumped into the puddle. Her feet hit the pavement. It was as predicted. But she did not sigh. She held onto whatever had gotten into her blood and did not let it out in a sigh to go back up into the wind where it came from, perhaps back into Pandora's box.

"What did you find?" the straight haired girl's sister called from behind. "Oh, just a puddle," she said, still standing in the fragments of the sky-lit waters.