Pangram–Wings

Here’s a short little story I’ve thought of writing down for several months. I’m not quite satisfied with the emotional mood of the story…Oh well. An added attraction is that this story is a pangram: that means that each sentence begins with the consecutive letter in the alphabet. Enjoy!

Autumn leaves blew under the garage door and slapped against puddles of frigid rain. Biting pellets of ice rung in a dry pit-pitter-patter as they assailed the tin scrapyard outside. Crying winds whistled around the cement edifice, rattling skeletal hands that reached toward the sky. Dry and safe, busy black ants danced in coiling and twisting lines to keep cozy within their shoe-box home.

Evanescent dawn arose, her rosy face lighting the sky. Forlorn, the wind had flown past the scrapyard, yet seeking that which she had lost. Giving an ear to the silence, one by one the black ants filed out their cut-out cardboard door eager to carry home hoards of crumbs. However, all they uncovered was an icy blue baby wrapped in a moist crimson leaf—so small and precious she could have slept on a pin head. Instinctively they brought the baby home, and as the years swept passed and the wind continued to roam, they cared for her and watched her grow.

Jungles of tin rose around the garage, and each morning, the ants would patter out their cardboard home into the yard. Keeping a caring eye on their tiny protégé, the swirling army of black scurried up blades of grass and down ditches in search of a morsel. Leaping along the little girl looked up at the blue-blue sky and around at the specks of green and pink and white peeking past the dry dirt. More and more she wandered away from her marching guardians in search of vibrant splashes. Night cut short her searches with a velvet blanket, and she scampered home to cardboard walls.

On one such treasure hunt, the little girl spotted two leaves of rainbow sheen fluttering in the breeze. Pouncing upon them, her eyes grew wide in wonder at their beauty. Quilted with downy scales, the delicate sheets shimmered in the deepest shades of aquamarine, emerald, and fuchsia. Raising them up to the sun, the little girl delighted in their shifting patterns of color. Swiftly, the wind whisked them and the little girl into the air as she grasped a leaf in each hand.

Twirling in a gentle skyward whirl, the wind lifted the little girl into the blue above before quieting to whisper. Up in the sky with the tin scrapyard behind and green canopies beneath, the little girl glided on the wings of the wind. Viewing a lovely world below, she longed for a life beyond cardboard walls. With a soft breeze, the wind carried what she had so long sought back to the rusty garage—joyous for reminding the tiny baby she had unknowingly blown out of her nest o so many years before of her true colors.

Xylophones rung in the little girl’s heart as she gazed through tears the shimmering sheets of rainbow float away in the breeze: in sorrow she crept through the cut-out cardboard door, her guardians scurrying around her feet, for she had gained and lost in one day a truth she had longed for without her even knowing.

Yet, by and by as the years dripped by and cardboard walls remained the same, she awoke one morning to find a lovely pair of periwinkle and rose wings folded delicately on her back. Zipping upward, the fairy waved goodbye to her old home of rusty tin and her busy ant guardians and turned her eyes to the unfathomable, sapphire zenith to unveil the whispered secrets of forests, fields, and fens.

THE END