How do you begin to go on living a life that you were thrust into after being plucked from your old one? Your body torn from the soil, your roots ripped and your flesh cold and exposed. All of your ambitions laid bare and locked in a box. Add it to the pile of boxes that you keep telling yourself you’ll unpack, but you never will. What is your life if it was neatly organized and set into place for you? Is that a life? Truly? You aren’t allowed to make your own choices because they were all chosen for you by a misty hand working from the shadows. Any semblance of comfort and familiarity is tossed into the fire and those boney fingers take your shoulders, turn you to a new path, and send you on your way. Farewell. Good luck.

  Your new life is now filled with strangers. Faces that once shared in your memories are now cold and foreign. But it’s okay, this is your new family now. You can trust them. This is your home. Could I move on from it? Could I get used to this?

  Perhaps I could eventually. Eventually. But when was my eventually? A few hundred years? A thousand? That’s not too long I guess. Not when you’re like us. Not when those faces you thought you could remember grow old and return to dust. There’s no one to miss when they’re all dead.

  I suppose I should stop trying to kill myself. I didn’t have the nerve to do it fast or violently, and it was clear that no one else would just let me waste away. It would be my only peace, but I wasn’t allowed to have it. My life was chosen. My path was set.

  And yet, I was sick and tired. Sick and tired of being sick and tired. I was sick of being told who I needed to be and what I needed to do. I was tired of what was expected of me. I was so completely and utterly sick of the perfection of it all. Everything was completed. There was nothing for me to do, no goal for me. The house, the car, the city… it was all just… complete. How was this a life?

  And me. I was sick of me. I was just so weary of looking at the perfect face in the mirror. Not a pimple to pop, not a hair to pluck. I was so thoroughly disgusted with myself and everyone and everything around me, I could hardly bear it.

  Deep down, through the eyes of this beast inside of me, I suppose I did truly love myself. I guess, generally speaking, I didn’t really hate myself. I was still me on the inside, I could feel it. I was no different. I wasn’t one of them. I was still the same arrogant asshole that I was last year, and the year before that. My own thoughts and desires hadn’t been lost; neither had my personality slipped away. I was still me. I just wasn’t the me I wanted to be.

  There was a lot to be said about how it was now. You’d think that a girl like me, any young person really, would want to slip into a fairy tail. So many humans will always say, "I wish magic was real!" Do you really? What would that cost you to get it? What would you have to lose?

  I was in a fairy tail now. I mean who really knew what existed outside our walls. Who knew what truly existed in tandem with this pale skin? If someone had asked me a few years ago, youthful and sneaking out to drink with my friends, if I had wished for the supernatural to be real life, I would have said yes. Hell yes. What were a few scary creatures in exchange for fairies and witches and magic? For werewolves and vampires and everything in between. Any young girl with eyes filled with moonlight would have done anything to see that our world was more than boring. Life had to be more than school then work then death. I wish it still was.

  It wasn’t like it wasn’t… beneficial. That is to say… there were benefits. Couldn’t get sick, couldn’t grow old, blah blah blah. But also, couldn’t thrive. No survival. Only existence. You can only exist when everything is perfect and taken care of. Some would say that never having to work or pay bills or earn your keep on this blue and green rock in any way was a blessing. I wish I could tell them all they were fools. Utter fools.

  The strength and "gifts" weren’t enough to dull the sting of regret and loneliness that shimmered around me every day. I had eyes that could see beauty and colors beyond any spectrum my mortal eyes could ever see, but everything looked gray and cold to me. I could hear sounds more musical than anything I could have imagined with my mortal ears, and yet nothing could penetrate this muffled haze inside my head. My body was strong, but my will was so, so weak. Maybe I was the only one of our kind that was filled with nothing but self-loathing. I might be able to enjoy this life, more magical than I had ever dreamed could exist… that is, if I didn’t pout so often.

  So here I sat, balanced on what I like to call my "special place." It was the tip of a roof point above my bedroom window in the center of my enormous, three story house. Why I needed a three story house as a single bachelorette was truly beyond me. Who knew why these creatures did anything that they did? I sat and sulked while I thought about my new gifts and just how fortunate I was to be living in a fantasy come true. What a life… but at what cost? I knew the answer to that.

  The cost was everything I had to leave behind.

  This immortal body was a curse when I looked over my shoulder to see the charred trail of my life that was engulfed in order to obtain it. Wherever my life was headed? Gone. All of my aspirations and dreams? Gone, too. Never to go home to my mother, my father, whose names and faces escaped me already. Never to see all the people I love again. If you didn’t want to kill everyone you held near and dear, you wouldn’t go fiddling around in their lives. You’d leave well enough alone. You’re nothing more than a monster now.

  I was new to my... kind. Very new. As in, only a few months into this curse. It was like having a new birthday. Yay. I was nothing more than an infant compared to some of the others who were in the hundreds, even thousands. I was too young to even be near civilization, let alone near my family. God help you if you get emotional. It’s worse when you let your emotions take hold of you. You lose track of who you are, what you have to focus on. Next thing you know, the world around you fogs up and all you can hear is the sound of their hearts pumping blood through their bodies. It’s not hard to imagine what comes next. I could feel my eyes sting as salty tears welled up and rolled over my cheeks.

  I cried often. Always too upset to function properly. I missed everything. My school, my family, my friends. My life… Even if I couldn’t remember it, I knew it was there, hiding behind a screen that wrapped around my mind. Memories faded into fuzz, like when you turn on your T.V. and you can see the outline of what you want to watch, but it’s jumbled into a mess of black and white bugs obscuring your view. Trying to see through the ant race.

  More tears ran lines down my cheeks and plopped into my open hands resting, palms up, on my folded legs. Almost like I was expecting my life to fall back to me, into my open grip, and I could take it back, or at least form it around what I try to call a life now. I peered through the water spilling out over my lashes and tried to find peace in the view of the forest surrounding the city. I closed my eyes, ignoring the sounds of the people bustling around below, and listened carefully to the wind in the trees.

  Shrill voices cut through the air and made me jump. My bloodshot eyes shot open to the sight of children running down the sidewalk.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  "Eyevoree! Eyevoree! Won’t you touch the skies with me? Or will you sit up on your house and cry until your eyes fall out!"

  Ah… Kids. Gotta love ’em.

  Some of the children of Anglaya. Back to visit… again. They usually took a different route from school, but frequented my house when they were feeling bored. I think they thought my life was severely lacking any entertainment. Really I should be grateful.

  I couldn’t remember if this rhyme was something they made up on their own or if one of their parents penned it for them. As if anyone had any respect for a mad woman. I snorted. They always had little sing-song tunes, rhymes and riddles and they just loved to make my life more pleasant. "What do you call a leaky gargoyle? You call it Eyevoree!" Get it? It’s because I’m on top of my house like a gargoyle. Are you laughing as hard as I am?

  There were four little boys, and they loved to torture me. They were all short with pudgy, boyish faces. They had annoying little crushes on me and attempted to flirt with their scarring words; the way a boy pushes a small girl into the mud and laughs, hoping that she will think him charming. They were also just mean, as I imagined all children were. I genuinely tried hard not to pay rude kids any mind, but they still had me aching to backhand them across the yard. They danced around in my view while I wiped away my tears. They continued on, chanting and twirling three stories below me. Even as young boys, they were incredibly graceful. They twirled and mocked me, spinning and hopping on and off my new fence. The new fence I just fixed last week. Again. Bastards.

  I hated them. They loved to make me even more miserable than this life offered. They taunted and spun, sang and danced. Their piercing chimes rang in my ears and maddened me. I felt my cheeks grow hot and my heart raced.

  "Eyevoree! Eyevoree!" I covered my ears to shut out the sound and suppress my tottering temper. I bit my lip to let the pain distract me from my fragile state of my mind; I felt black blood settle in a pool on my tongue. I pressed my palms into my ears trying to block out the sound, internally battling the need to cry or scream, but it seeped through my fingers. Normally I was able to ignore them long enough for them to get bored and leave, but I couldn’t handle their crap today. Not anymore.

  Finally, I felt myself shatter. I snapped my head up and set my eyes on them. They kept dancing until one, who looked like the youngest, most likely eleven or twelve as a human, noticed my glare and shushed the rest. I slowly stood up, keeping my leer, and stepped off my roof into open air. The sound of my feet hitting the ground made them all flinch. I had their full attention.

  I had landed right in front of the oldest, I’d presumed. He couldn’t have been any older than fifteen as a human. He cringed slightly, but straightened up to make himself as tall as his bones would allow after noticing my smile and severely misinterpreting it. I still towered over this vermin, stuck in adolescence, dozens of times the natural year span.

  Even our young, children or even babies, still grew old. We all grew old, it just happened so slowly that no one really cared for turning children. If you felt like taking care of a baby or young child for decades, that was your prerogative, but it wasn’t a smart choice. They were disastrously bad at keeping secrets. They were also disgusting. Exhibit A.

  The boy grinned and put his hands on his hips, looking around at his flock and feeling proud to be approached. My smile melted away, replaced by a menacing sneer, and fear came into his eyes as he finally realized this was not a friendly or flirty encounter. I bared my teeth and a feral hiss made him take a step back, raising his hand in front of him. He stared, all of that arrogance wiped from his face, and waited for me to react.

  They were about to bolt—I could see their spindly legs tense up—when I flicked my arm out and grabbed him by the neck. The movement was so lethally fast that he cried out. I bent down so that our eyes were level and I was right in his face. The others let out a sharp gust of air and tensed in a meaningless effort to defend their friend. I dug carefully polished nails into his neck. "Back," I spit at the others. The boy whimpered and waved them off. They stopped but readied themselves for a battle and I chuckled, not even bothering to look at any of them.

  "Now what were you saying? I couldn’t hear you from all the way up there. Care to repeat it?" I breathed. He cowered when I spoke and struggled slightly, but my grip on his neck was iron. He reached up, fingers tearing at my own, but I held him secure.

  "N-nothing, Eyevoree." His gaze did not meet mine. He stared at the floor with wide, yellow-brown eyes. From the corner of my eye, I saw several people hovering a few houses down, alerted to the noise. Mumbling and gasping was my sign to wrap this up.

  "Good. Now—," I put my hand around his cheeks and pushed him onto the floor, jabbing a sharp fingernail in his face, "you stay away from my house! All of you!" I pointed swiftly to each one of them, "You come by here to bother me again and I’ll beat your ass from here to the Elders!" They all jumped at the abrupt change in volume like I had electrocuted them. I looked at each one of their faces individually, slowly, deliberately, and turned around.

  I curled my legs beneath me and jumped onto the side of my house, several feet up, and kicked off of it, sending myself higher still into the air. I did a backflip over my yard, over their heads, and while I was upside down, I gave them one last smug look and threw my arms out to either side of my body. I brought them down hard against my thighs. My bones creaked, but as my arms collided with my sides, they burst into immense purple wings.

  I soared over them and lightly kicked the brunette one off of my fence, sending him face first into a mouthful of grass. I turned and flew up to my sanctuary and gracefully landed on my toes, all the while feeling their eyes glued to me as I demonstrated my superior skill that far surpassed theirs when it shouldn’t have. I folded my ankles and, with a little huff, assumed a cross-legged form again, facing outward to my world. As I touched solid land once more, my wings returned my arms to me and I gently folded them in my lap. I looked down at the boys who caused me so much torment. They were still staring in amazement at me, mouths slightly ajar.

  Flying was very simple, once you had your wings… well, for me it was. I was the only one of my kind ever in our history to obtain my wings so quickly. Or so I was told. It usually took several months to get them to emerge, and many months, or even years to master them successfully. The young children, or those that had only just been turned, could use their newly acquired wings to pointlessly flap, but they could not ascend into the skies for some time. For me, it was as easy as breathing used to be. It wasn’t something that was easy to explain. It felt natural. You just had to learn to will them into existence. I simply told my wings to pop and they did so.

  I was also apparently the only one of us with colored wings. They came in all shapes and sizes but never were a pair any other color than black. Mine were a dazzling, dark purple, just as my eyes were.

  Yet another mystery about me. Everyone got the eyes of their old self, with just a hint of abnormality, like the eldest boy with the butterscotch eyes. He could pass for brown, but to us, we knew he was not human. It made it easier for our kind to blend into society, and easier to detect another one of us, even in disguise. If we ever wanted to go out, we could do so because our eyes weren’t red or black or any strange variations from human stories.

  But my eyes. No, my eyes sparkled a magnificent violet with flecks of blue and yellow. I was an outcast. I was not meant to fit in. Not meant to be part of this world, to blend. If my appearance wasn’t enough to estrange me from the rest of my peers, my personality sealed the deal. It’s not like it mattered; I stayed away from others most days. I despised them merely for what they were, what I was, and the fact that they accepted it and actually enjoyed it. They despised me for my differences. It worked out for the better; I stayed away from them as much as possible because I hated them, and they stayed away from me from fear and confusion.

  I looked at the boys and grinned, waving my hand in dismissal. They still stood, shocked and embarrassed, but finally scrambled away at the indication for them to leave before I did break them. Glancing at the adults down the street, I flashed them a middle finger. Some women gasped in outrage. I scoffed and rolled my eyes, turning my attention back to the little brats. I watched them flit away and take my eyes to somewhere that I could rest them and see past to a world that made sense.