Sweet Pea and His Tiny Stony Heart by Sandra Arnold

The day Clancy started school, a girl pointed at her head, and hooted, ‘You’ve got no eyebrows.’ When Clancy went home, she looked in the mirror and wondered why she hadn’t noticed her missing eyebrows before. Next morning, she borrowed her mother’s eyebrow pencil and drew two thick black arches where her eyebrows should be. When she walked in the door of her classroom the teacher told her to go outside. She followed Clancy out the door, pointed to the pencilled arches and told her to go to the washroom and rub them off. Clancy scrubbed hard and wondered if she’d also rubbed off the few remaining blonde hairs  that were pretending to be eyebrows.

Soon after the eyebrows’ day Clancy heard teachers talking about her as if she wasn’t there. As if she had no ears. ‘She’s so shy.’ ‘She never makes eye contact.’ ‘She’s got nothing to say for herself.’ When she checked in the mirror her reflection confirmed what she’d suspected. There was a blank space where her ears used to be.

In those first weeks at school the other children quickly made friends, played games, formed teams. No one asked Clancy to join in. She spent most of her breaks on her own in a corner of the playground. One day she found a grey, heart-shaped stone lying on the ground near where she lurked each break. She picked up the stone, held it to her cheek and whispered, ‘Your name is Sweet Pea and you’re my best friend.’ She carried Sweet Pea home in her pocket and back again to school the next day. In her corner of the playground she held Sweet Pea in her hand and told him stories. She knew he kept her stories safe.

When Clancy was sixteen she left school and started her first job in the local library. Her ears and eyebrows were still missing, but her fringe and long hair covered those blank spaces. She looked forward to helping people who looked puzzled and lost in the library, but when she walked up to them they turned away and asked other staff members for help.

Everyone in the staff room talked to each other and ignored her. When she tried to join in the conversation they didn’t seem to hear her and carried on talking as if she wasn’t there. She sat alone with her cup of tea, wishing she had Sweet Pea in her pocket, watching her colleagues, listening to what animated them so much. Conversations about their children, their dogs and cats, where they were going on their holidays. The words flew around the room and in and out of the shelves of books in never-ending circles. She memorised some of the phrases and tried repeating them in the next coffee break. Same result. No one even looked at her.

One day she brought Sweet Pea to work and pulled him out of her pocket in the staff room to show everybody. She started telling them how amazed she’d been to find a stone shaped like a perfect heart. No one looked at her or at Sweet Pea. They carried on talking about cats and dogs. The next day she hesitated outside the staff room door when she heard ‘She’s a bit weird, isn’t she?’ ‘She’s hardly there at all.’ ‘How on earth did she get this job when she can’t interact with people?’ She strode into the room and looked at her colleagues with what she hoped was a challenging stare. They didn’t turn around.

Over the following weeks Clancy noticed her arms getting thinner. Not only thinner but sometimes she could see through the skin to the veins and sinews beneath. One day she glanced down at her left arm and saw it had disappeared. Soon her right arm and each leg below the knee vanished. She could still feel them, but she couldn’t see them. Occasionally she heard people say, ‘Haven’t seen whatsername for a while’ when she was right there in front of them. So she stopped going in to work. Her parents didn’t notice her hanging around at home. They had six more mouths to feed.

One night, when the whole household was asleep, Clancy climbed out of bed, got dressed, took Sweet Pea off her dressing table, put him in her pocket and went outside into the cold night. She walked until she reached the forest near her house where she used to play as a child. Where she’d been happy. She remembered dancing around the trees singing songs she’d learnt from the birds. But now she felt too tired to dance and sing. She imagined people must feel like this when they were very old. Too tired to go any further, she lay down on the forest floor and fell asleep.

In the morning she woke to the sound of whispering and the sensation of fingers touching her face. She opened her eyes and saw a crowd of tiny transparent creatures watching her. They smiled and stroked her hands. Hands that were now visible. She realised that these transparent creatures could see all of her. They joined their own hands to form a ring around her body and began to sing. As their music filled Clancy’s head, she took Sweet Pea out of her pocket and laid him on the ground. He opened his heart and released the stories he’d stored for her all these years.

When the music and stories filled the forest, one of the creatures asked Clancy if she would like them to teach her to fly. Once she knew how to fly, he said, she could go wherever she pleased. If she wanted to live with them here in the forest, that would be okay too. They told her there was no rush to make a decision. She could think about it as long as she liked. She told them thinking wasn’t necessary.

Sandra Arnold

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay  – tiny white heart shaped stone.