No. 4 The Chromatic Compendium of the Rainbow Ringmaster - The little blue girl

​Not much further than the rolling hills where Iris and Zypher roamed was a place equally as dull and daunting as the one the Ringmaster had transformed. In this world sat a quiet child, from the looks of it she was like any other little girl. Very alike other children in the sense that she played with her dolls and required attention, though very little attention did she receive. The little girl, Elara, was used to floating by her lonesome. She floated through life, unaware of the chaos that surrounded her. She floated when her father died, and soon she drifted so far she could no longer remember his face. She imagined him like a soldier, strong and valiant. She would play with the toy soldiers in her box and float away with them into battlefields full of muck and decay. She sat in this big wide room imagining all the places she could be. Above her hung a canvas so vast and vibrant, she called it heavenly. Its where she sent all the soldiers when they died. In her heart she knew they were acending to a better place, so death she imagined for them often. And sometimes she even imagined herself in that canvas too. In her world, however, when it was time for her to float back, she would often find herself amidst the loud shrieking of the replacement her mother had found for her father. She had heard the yelling and fighting for so long she did not flinch when plates broke against walls or hands flailed against porcelain vases. She would just hold her jester and walk to her room where these noises became muted and she could drift away through the canvas into a quiet, serene place.

​So Elara perfected the art of floating. When her father died, and then one day the screaming stopped altogether and her mother had died too. She didn't know how or why, she just knew she was gone and everyone said she found peace. Elara was so distant, so drifted that she couldn't remember them burying her mother, just like she didn't remember them burying her father.

The replacement her mother had found, well, for the short time she would see him after he was always kind to her, even if he were rather careless. He would often tousle her hair or poke her shoulders in passing, but very little did he actually look to her. Then eventually his acknowledgments ceased all together, his presence stilled and he drifted off too, leaving Elara all alone.

​Now this girl was accustomed to living life in one way, she was taken care of by the help. Often she would find herself trailing them just seeing what she could do to fill her time and they happily obliged her when she would order the staff for groceries she wanted, or when she made up lies about her step fathers business trips and whatnot. She was old enough to make sure all the staff in that large mansion her father once hung his hat and called home didn't question her wellbeing too much. The maids were very kind to her, they would comb her hair every morning and dress her, then again before they left in the evening they would come to her room and put her in her nightgown and brush her teeth. They were affectionate at times, they would pinch her cheeks in passing, but often they gave her this knowing look of sadness, for they knew she was alone and perhaps might have always been. They waited on her and waited and waited, never really questioning that she was always alone, truthfully they were there to work and so work they did. At the end of the day they always went home to their own families with thier own children and forgot about her, at least that's what it felt like, though unlike her family they did return each morning.

Then slowly as the days passed fewer and fewer of the staff appeared each day. Some days they did not visit her to comb her hair and change her clothes so she did it herself. It seemed they no longer had the time to dote on her, hurried they always rushed past her. She did not know why, she just saw a worried look on thier faces as the remaining staff did their best to try to keep up with the vast amount of chores not meant for a few people. As the weeks passed the numbers dwindled more and more, and the remaining staff would complain to each other as they went about their tasks. Elara felt she missed thier company so she sook out someone she was familiar with but none of those faces she could find. She only found the new faces of unhappy maids, she kept to herself quiet and tip toed around so as not to be seen. She hid in the grand hall listening to the woman scrubbing the floors of the music room where her father's grand piano sat, saying "Blast that dastardly man! He gambles away a fortune and we have to pay for it by doing more work for less pay! Surely i will be gone by the weeks end!" The woman scrubbing the floor beside her grumbled in agreeance. They meant what they said because by the weeks end nobody came. Suddenly it seemed Elara was truely alone. No one opened the grand curtains in the morning and no one doted on her. Nevertheless it didn't matter to Elara because for a long time now she had always been alone. Now she was old enough to cook an egg here and there. She fed the chickens in the backyard and collected their eggs. She sat with them and would pet them and pick greens for them in the garden. One day as she visited her only freinds, the rooster for no reason at all pecked her so violently her finger bled, in anger she kicked him away. No one was there to tell her it was wrong, but she knew it was. She left with eggs in her pocket crying as she ran to the kitchen to put them away. She put her eggs in the refrigerator, now bloodied by her little finger and ran her finger under the sinks water and let the cool water soothe more than just her injury. She did her best to feed herself and care for herself, though many a boiled egg she did eat, it was the only thing she really knew how to cook. She found herself thinking of all the foods she missed eating. The crepes, and fettuccine pasta, her favorite was the ice cream a la mode, the thought that she may never have them again saddened her and she could bear to eat that day, not another boiled egg.

Then one day, she found herself in her room and the silence was deafening. She played with her bowling pins and jester, taking turns and teasing him about how all the people go away and how he might too. Jester just smiled as she held him.

She thought of her first memory with him, the memory of her father handing him to her after a long trip away, in that memory she could only see his hands and sweet jester her beloved.

She held jester so tightly he could have melted into her and as she did a tear found its way out of her eye. She wiped it with her hand and looked at the tear, so shocked to see that she could form anything again, especially a dewdrop from her eyes. Soon so many tears followed that jester was wet as though he had been soaked in the tub. She lifted her face up to wipe her eyes and her hand shocked her even more because for the life of her, she didn't remember being blue, but perhaps she had overlooked that too.

Looking around she realized that perhaps

​for just a moment the room she inhabited didn't seem like the mucky green she was used to. For a moment, the room was a place of gentle rolling hills, weightless stillness. She looked around, seeing that the air, thick with the scent of imagination, held all of her favorite things aloft. Her jester toy, with its wide, unchanging smile, spun slow circles beside her. Her bowling pins drifted like silent, wooden sentinels, and a porcelain vase, a masterpiece of delicate cracks, poured its endless stream of water and flowers into the air, the liquid and petals suspended in time.

​But it was the heart-shaped clock that fascinated her most. Its face, soft and pliable beneath the cracked glass as if it were melting, was a mystery. Two hands told the time, but the third, a swift, thin arrow, was a secret. It pointed not to an hour or a minute, but to a feeling, a longing for a world she knew existed, just beyond the edges of her own.