Joanna Furtado, age 15 years

The unmanned rowing boat escaped the current, and veered towards the quay. Wood struck wood, sending a shiver through the planks beneath my feet. The boat came to rest with its flank against the wooden ladder that descended into the water, as if inviting me to climb down and board it.

It was still now, but not silent. On the deck lay a long box of wine-red wood, studded with tiny, tarnished mirrors. From within came a soft but insistent knocking.

I didn’t reach down and touch it. I’m too much of a coward to do that. I’ve always been overcautious, shy, all my life. It’s why I’m out here, on this cold, moony night instead of inside with my parents.

I knew what was in it anyway, but my heart hammered with a faint hope for the impossible.

A soft rain pattered like tiny fingers on my face, and I heard the knocking slow, like a heart steadying from shock. The moonlight kissed my skin.

I stood, waiting, wishing, hoping. I told myself it could be the movement of the boat creating it, or a trapped animal. I told myself to turn around and slip away and get on with avoiding going back home.

But I could hear the knocking becoming slow and gradual, and knew it would stop soon. I waited, my throat so chocked it was as if there apple lodged firmly, stuck. Suddenly, unexpectedly, soft on the wind, a single voice sung a strange wild song. It sounded like a single ray of moonlight.

It was then I knew that it was over. Evie was gone.

We found it in the attic. Evie and I, bent over the box which was the colour of a plum just ripe. I was looking at Evie though- her eyes shiny as a berry, her breath catching in her throat.

I think I knew even then.

She’s a strange one, is Evie, as desolate as the moon on the sea. A pale lemon face with limp blonde hair hung like curtains on either side.

She loves the wind dancing beside her, the flowers smiling at the sun and the smell of dark storms out to sea. She takes my hand and tells me.

The taste of a flooded river.

“And what does that taste of Evie?” I laugh.

Her solemn eyes dance. “Triumph. Excitement. Spices.”

Mother and father don’t understand her. I’ve heard their cruel whispers in the dark where they think she can’t hear. Their meaty mouths set. Their faces red with her last sin. Singing that gypsy song in church. Talking of seeing faces in the clouds. I’ve heard what they call her. I can say nothing.

When she was younger, I‘d walk down to the sharp spitting quay with Evie in her pram. The sea would throw spray up and send it slapping around my legs like a lizards tongue.

Evie would look out, far out to sea.

“I want to go home.” She’d say.

“Alright.” I’d turn the pram homeward, and she fought like she was drowning.

“NO. No. Home!”

“This is the way home Evie.”

“Home.” She’d point across the ocean. “Home is out there. I want to go home, Kat.”

I’m the only one she calls by name. Everyone else is a shadowy ghost to her, a mere figment of a long forgotten dream.

Sometimes she disappears for two days, three, but I always know where to find her. High on her snake grass hill with the wind rustling like a faithful dog behind you. But mostly down by the sea, staring out, with bare longing on her face and a single word on her lips. Home.

Once she disappeared for a week. It was the dead of winter, and the snow was so thick on the ground it was as though the clouds had fallen down from the cold clear sky. My heart was dead with worry. How could Evie have survived even one night in this dark, solemn snowfall?

But then I saw her. Running through the snow, an icy frill sewn onto all of her clothes. “Kat!” She calls, her voice feverish with excitement. “Kat! Mother and father met me out on the lake!”

I stared, bemused. Over the past few days, mother and father had completely ignored the absence of their youngest daughter. Surely they wouldn’t brave the cold for her…?

“They said I can go home soon, Kat. They gave me a boat. So I can go home.”

Not my mother and father, then.

She doesn’t belong to this world, the air around me whispers. Even what she says is wrong. When everyone else says “Oh my goodness” she chants “Oh to jasmines bower” and talks of places where the flowers turn to watch you as you pass.

But she does belong, I shout. She belongs to me.

My heart trembled as Evie flicked open the varnished latch of the dull red box. I could see the wild joy melting her eyes.

Inside was a music box, with a slim fairy ready to dance on top. It was a graceful, dark wooded thing, with curling reaching patterns twisting longingly on the side.

I could see it reflected in Evie’s eyes.

“It must be one of mother’s old toys.” I said quickly. “We could ask her.”

Evie just stood still, quiet. I bent forward and turned the key, feeling an air of inevitability around me. But I was surprised: no music tinkled, although the fairy did pirouette slowly on top, a stiff awkward turn like it knew its age, and a faint knocking echoed from the key turning tiredly against the inside.

“It’s broken” I said, disappointed. I turned to look at Evie and my stomach tipped over like I’d fallen a great distance.

She was swaying slightly, mesmerised, her body as suddenly stiff as if she had been frozen, and on her face was a smile of such savage ecstasy that I wanted to wipe it off in one swipe. “It’s beautiful.” She murmurs.

“What’s beautiful?”

“The music. It reminds me of home.”

“This is your home Evie.” I’ve said it so much the words turn to grey sludge on my mouth. “And there isn’t any music. Evie?”

But I knew she couldn’t hear me anymore. I could feel her drifting away, from her life, from me. I stood up and shook her, felt her bones as hollow as a bird.

“They can hear it. They can hear it too, Kat.”

“What? Evie, who? Who….”

“Its calling them. Calling me home! Home. They can hear the call now. To take me home.”

“Your home is here!” I shouted. I felt her becoming wild, like the wind on a storm, and she twisted away from me, the sudden fluidity of her movement breathtaking. She looked at the music box, and then ran from the attic.

Mother and father stormed at me. Evie had disappeared again, as I knew she would, and my parents blamed me, their eyes exploding softly with the shame of it all.

“Why were we cursed with such children!” they sobbed.

I watched, stony faced, thinking as fast as a flooded river. The music box had gone, disappeared just as completely as Evie herself.

I had to find her, her home is here. With me.

“I’ll find her” I promised my parents, my words full of needling sarcasm.

I looked down again at the unmanned boat, bobbing like a buoy in an unexpected wave. I bent down and picked up the leather red box, and slowly opened it to see the music box, the key slowly knocking its prison walls, but the stiff fairy had disappeared, torn off the top in a savage hurry.

It had happened.

I looked out to sea through the sparkling moonlight, and I thought I could see her dark eyes boiling like a whirlpool, and I could hear her singing that wild gypsy song with the wind.

The key stopped turning, soft and calm, and in the turn of a wave, she was there, swooping over the spray, hand in hand with someone else. As tears blurred my vision she disappeared into the dazzling moonlight, going home, never to return.

I swear she had wings.

Joanna Furtado