By Oliver D. King
Miracle lay in the prickly grass stalks. She scrunched her fingers in the cool dirt and took slow, deliberate breaths to absorb the brown, earthy scent of autumn. And she listened. The wind rustled the seed-heavy grass heads swaying above. A tree creaked nearby. Apple and pear floated on the breeze, mixed with the must of old leaves and blue rain. A bird warbled low, its trill rising sharply at the end. Next to her ears, something crept along the ground. A grasshopper, pausing to rub its legs before springing away to land on her thigh. It crept toward her knee, and she giggled.
Swishing grass announced someone entering the field. Her heart pounded and she caught her breath. She recognized those steps.
“Miracle!” the woman called. “Miracle!”
With a grunt, Miracle rolled onto her hands and knees, clucked her tongue, and took a good look at the tall grass around her. The creaking trees were not far. If she stayed low enough, she just might make it.
She hunched up her backside, dug her toes into the earth, and crawled as quickly as she could. The rustling she made might as well have been shouting. Her mother would surely see her now. But Miracle pushed on, ignoring just how visible she had made herself, despite trying to keep quiet.
She crawled out of the grass, clucked again, and gauged the distance to the nearest tree. Keeping low, she rounded the trunk of the young oak and pressed her back into the jagged bark. She held her breath.
“Miracle!” called her mother. “I know you’re hiding behind that tree!”
Miracle clucked her tongue several more times as she thought of what to do next. The forest stretched before her, thick at first, but growing fainter farther in. She knew the place well, although she doubted her mother knew how often she came here. Not far away stood the old tree with low branches that Miracle loved to climb. If she could make it before her mother saw, maybe she could avoid the inevitable bath to come.
Clucking her tongue a few more times, Miracle sprinted away. Her feet crunched the leaves, crackles of them sticking between her toes. As she passed beneath a pine tree, the boughs above shook with the wind louder than her footfalls. Fallen needles prickled her feet. A bird sang somewhere ahead, near her climbing tree, perhaps even perched in it. She modified her course and let the song be her guide.
She reached the tree and paused to absorb its unique groans, deeper and richer than the taller trees behind. As the wind blew, her climbing tree sighed the resigned sigh of old age. She smiled.
Then she caught those soft, evenly spaced crunches she would know anywhere. Her mom. Miracle clucked and jumped to clutch the nearest branch. She pulled herself up and, with a flip of one leg, straddled it. Clucking as she went, Miracle swung from branch to branch, moving higher as she worked around the trunk. With a final cluck, she gazed down. Satisfied with the height, she leaned against the trunk and waited.
She took a deep breath and let the sweet scent of the leaves and the brown, mossy scent of the bark fill her nostrils. She inclined her ear to the hush of the old tree in the breeze. Her dog, Rascal, a motley hound that mostly slept on the porch, barked lazily. The horses clopped through the field. The heavy, steady trotting was Lucy, her mother’s horse. Boring, in Miracle’s opinion. She preferred Thunder. His were the lighter clops that rumbled in broken bursts, no doubt galloping and kicking up his hind legs. Miracle grinned. Maybe she’d coax Thunder into a bareback romp later.
A barred owl cried out from deeper in the woods, the echoes of it muddling through the boughs and branches. A cardinal sang two trees away. Cicadas buzzed a little farther up Miracle’s tree. Squirrels chased each other, jumping from branch to branch, tree to tree, about fifty feet away.
And Miracle’s mother stalked ever closer. Miracle huffed. There would be no escaping this time. She certainly couldn’t climb down and dash to the next hiding spot in time. Instead, she inclined her ear to her mother’s footfalls and watched the sound of her approach.
At the foot of the tree, her mother stopped. “Miracle?”
Miracle sighed. “I’m here, Momma.”
“I know. I can see you.” Miracle’s mother took a deep breath. “Child, you are aging me beyond my years. I suppose I must climb up and get you now.”
“No!” shouted Miracle. “I can climb down. Watch.”
Clucking constantly, Miracle swung herself back down from branch to branch. Her mother gasped and muttered soft prayers at all the right moments. Miracle smirked as she clucked one last time and jumped to the ground.
Her mother snatched her hand and pulled her toward the house. “Why do you keep doing this?” she asked. “It’s too dangerous for you out here, and much too dangerous for you to climb trees. What if you encountered a wolf? Or a tree sprite? What must I do for you to stop this foolishness?”
“It’s not dangerous, I like it out here. I can see better.”
“You can’t see, Miracle. That’s the problem.”
“Just because I’m blind doesn’t mean I can’t see!”
“That’s enough! You could get lost or worse!”
Miracle yanked away and crossed her arms. She ran home, clucking as she went. With each whisper of the wind, creak of a tree, song of a bird… with every cluck of her tongue, the world burst vibrantly in her mind as her ears drew shapes and distances with the sounds and echoes, and her nose painted color to every shape.
Her mother didn’t understand. She could never understand. Miracle saw better than anyone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OHHHHH. Something struck me as odd about all the details Miracle was noticing, but I didn’t realize what it was until I realized she was blind.
Well done!
Nicely done to engage the reader in a different world. This time the blind. If you have ever lost your sight even temporarily it makes you pause to think and appreciate not the loss but the gain.
@Zachary – Thank you! It was my goal to write it in such a way that a sighted person wouldn’t realize everything was sound and smell descriptions until the very end.
@Colin – Thank you too! It was quite a challenge to write from the POV of someone blind….a bit like coloring on black paper.
Oh, wow! This was so well done! I loved all the subtle hints. …And Miracle’s poor mother X’D, lol