Free Bird Song by S. L. Naeole Page B

talking.
    I nodded my head once again, wincing as I braced myself for the thought-lashing I feared I’d get just for moving.   Instead, I felt her body shake with laughter.   She started moving again, and I did everything she told me to do, keeping my eyes closed until she told me it was time to let go.
    Only then did I realize how sore my face was, or how my hair didn’t seem to move when I moved my head.   I raised my hand to the top of my head and gasped.   “What happened to my hair?”
    The wind had whipped my hair up into a massive mound of tangles and debris, leaves and dirt were caked between the strands.   Now I know what the front end of a car felt like while traveling down the freeway.   “Are there bugs in my hair?” I asked frantically, my hands weaving through the tangles, pulling and yanking at the knots, hoping that nothing that fell out had more legs than I did.
    Lark’s laughter echoed around me, and she doubled over from the force of it, my obvious discomfort and disheveled appearance being quite amusing to her.   “You look so ridiculous right now.”
    Using my fingers, I tried desperately to comb my hair in hopes that it’d be somewhat presentable by the time Robert arrived.
    “Oh cut it out, Grace.   He won’t care if you look like a Princess or a matted sheep dog.   He only cares that you’re safe, which you are, thanks to me.   And now, I have to get back to my house before Graham starts to wonder where I’m at.”   Lark held her hand out to my hair and touched it lightly, dirt and leaves falling down around me.   “There, all fixed.   Now, Robert said he’d be here as soon as he could.   Have a great time, and I’ll see you next year.”
    I didn’t have enough time to get a thank-you out before she was gone.
    I turned around to look at the empty gazebo, the floor covered in leaves and slush.   There was nowhere to sit in the gazebo, so I leaned against the railing and waited in the cold.  
    The jacket I had chosen to wear had no lining and I instantly regretted grabbing it while I watched with growing distress as tiny white specks started to fall from the sky.
    “Just great,” I muttered, tucking my hands underneath my armpits, and silently wishing that I had remembered to grab some gloves.   The weather was turning bitter, the wind whipping up in angry howls with each passing minute, and I knew that it wouldn’t be long before the sprinkling of snow turned into an all out downpour of white.
    “Where are you, Robert?” I asked out loud, knowing that no one was going to answer me, but needing to hear a sound other than the whistling of the wind through the branches, and the pattering of falling twigs and leaves as they landed on the roof of the gazebo.
    The chill in the air turned my breath into white puffs of vapor, and my teeth began to click against each other as I fought the chattering that threatened to turn my entire body into a human jackhammer.  
    I knew midnight had come and gone by the colorful spangles and bursts of light in the sky that announced the end of one year, and the beginning of another.   I felt my heart sink into my sneakers as the colors began to fade, the loud crackling and popping dwindled, and the smell of gunpowder finally drifted away while only the clean smell of snow and green remained.
    “Well, there goes that idea,” I muttered to myself, and slowly eased my frigid bones into motion.   The lights that usually kept the gravel parking lot lit had not had their bulbs replaced since that last night I had been here alone nearly a month ago.
    As I walked past them, the crunch of my sneakers against the gravel triggered the sharp memories of slamming into them to flash into my mind.   I flinched at each sickening crunch, the sounds reminding me of the pain that had been inflicted on me by a jealous and ambitious angel—everything angels weren’t supposed to be.   I quickened my pace, desiring only to plant my feet on solid