A Tale for Adolescents: A Warning Against Perfect Productivity

The milky silhouette of a prancing gazelle danced across the bright aquamarine sky, chased by its suitor, a refrigerator on wheels. This was the image the old woman saw, laying in the cool grass of late afternoon, on the top of a lonely hill that never felt too lonely. Her hair floated around her head like a velvety cloud, wisps being gently tossed across her face, drifting to the whims of the wind. This was the only position in which her contorted neck could find peace. Throughout the day, however, the woman was forced to perpetually face the sky, for any other angle her head might tilt caused her excruciating pain. This resulted in her face being constantly exposed to the sun, spray-painted with kisses of discoloration. She possessed a talent few people in her locale were aware of––the ability to get lost in the winding, complex mazes of the clouds––unlocking doors in her imagination. She saw Pepto Bismol bottles in fog banks and heard the gossip of the four winds in their whimsical whistling language.

The life of the old woman was simple. She rose from her cot, crawled out from the womb of her 13 hand-stitched purple duvets, and left her shoebox of an apartment to milk her tortoiseshell goat and collect duck eggs from her floating friends in the puddle adjacent to her home. She used to be like the townspeople: too focused on the ground beneath her feet and the skyscraper, board meeting, spreadsheet-filled aspirations in her mind to even look up. Her neck pain set in one day when she tripped, fell to her knees before a puddle, and saw the sky’s crystalline reflection on the surface of the murky water. The ripples drew her eyes up to the blue above and, having seen it once, she could never look down again. Her family ridiculed her for her tomfoolery and expelled her from her home with a knapsack of her things. She wandered for days, peeing in the woods, laying in the grass, letting her hair tangle in an irreversibly messy state, defying the laws of gravity and proper etiquette. A few days later she stumbled upon an abandoned home on the top of a hill invisible to the townspeople. She took a lap around the house and from her knapsack fell thirty-three minuscule seeds, which instantly burrowed into the moist impressionable earth.

Years passed. The seedlings sprouted from the ground, growing up the sides of the house, weaving in and out of the decaying wood planks, holding the house together with their strong young fronds. Meanwhile, back in the village, where everyone knew everyone, there lived a young girl named Nooruk. In order to save time, everyone just referred to her as Noor. She came from a family of accomplished printmakers and was at the age of full mobility. One day she dropped an enormous pot of ink that shattered, releasing a flood of jet-black murky fluid that covered the entire studio and stained all the newspapers (weeks of work that hung on strings along the walls) with droplets of darkness. Her father bellowed a series of curse words that chased her out of the house and town with their razor-sharp claws. She ran. Her legs became the wind and she blew from the outskirts of the village, weaving through the wallowing woods and up a lonely hill. The adrenaline trailed from her body into the grass beneath her bare feet and she collapsed to the ground in a heap of hair, hopes, and heat.

Only then was Noor able to get a hold of her surroundings––a tall white oak tree and an exhilarating field of daisies, grass, and diamonds, upon which sat an unbothered old woman gazing at the brilliant sapphire sky. The old woman didn’t say a word. She was too lost in the serpentine gossip the wind whispered to her to partake in conversation or even notice her presence. Noor had heard tales about the crazy old woman who lived atop the mountain but never believed that they could be true. In front of her now sat the notorious deadbeat her parents had warned her about. But she could do nothing but stare at the slithering strands of silver atop the old woman’s head. It then occurred to Noor that the hair was not even the most peculiar part of the old woman. It was the fact that her face was parallel to the sky, staring directly upward, unlike anyone she had ever seen before. What could possibly be so fascinating about the sky that someone could be so mesmerized?

At this moment, Noor’s eyes rose from the face of the woman to the clouds. For the first time, she observed their morphing bodies: pepper shaker to cabbage, fire extinguisher to saucepan. The cool breeze tickled her neck and she exhaled a sigh of relief, releasing a tsunami of tension from her body. The fingers of the grass brushed every inch of her skin with scintillating delicacy. She sunk her ink-covered hands into the earth and the grains of dirt buried themselves under her nails. However, their shameful uncleanliness never crossed her mind. She let out an earth-shakingly hearty laugh, pulling the old woman out of her dream. Noor’s was the first voice other than her own that the old woman had heard in what felt like millennia. The old woman was so pleasantly surprised that she leapt from her criss-cross-apple-sauced seat on the hillside, leaving a ring of blossoming white daffodils behind. She took off into the sky, her figure softened, billowing up into the air. She began to dance with painless ease, in a celestial state of tranquility and grace. She waved her arms like the branches of the white oak, smiled with the dazzling brightness of her daisies, and wove through the clouds like her vines until her form and theirs were indistinguishable.

The old woman’s ethereal disappearance seemed so unreal that it made Noor question her mental stability. She thought it could be an adrenaline-induced illusion, but in her heart of hearts she prayed it was real. All she was sure of was that the clouds fascinated her in ways a printing press never could. The life she had always known could never be as perfect as that moment, there on the mountaintop, upon a field of daisies, grass, and diamonds, in the company of the clouds. The wind shifted and out of the condensation of the sky emerged a hand, waving farewell to Noor, who lay on the hillside, face angled to the sky.

Mia Giles, '23

Prose