Daughter Of Dandelion

By Tanisha Desai

I see blue.  

Not blue, really; black, a kind of swimming obsidian blanketing me. Protecting me. Caging me.  And spangled with a hundred lanterns.  

And now it’s a hazed chequerboard, because my eyes are blurry from squinting. Ma used to point  up at the interlacing constellations, and she’d tell me how when died and became a star, she’d be  part of one of them. I wonder if she’s up there.  

I uproot a defenseless dandelion and close my eyes.  

4/3/1983  

Dear Diary,  

I keep rewriting this because the tears always splodge the ink. I was sitting in The Green with  Ma today, and she was showing me a dandelion. How when you pick out all the petals, someone  dies. And I remember her face. All straw hair striping her eyes so you couldn’t see their twinkle,  cheekbones that could slice paper and skin whiter than the dandelions.  

And then, like the dandelion, she was gone.  

5/6/1992  

Dear Diary,  

I think I’m hearing voices. Ma’s lilting foreign lullabies, screams of memory in the dead of  night. And so I crawled out of bed. I met Biscuit outside. His whimpers tore my ears. He missed  her too, I think.  

A boy, no older than eight, was shrieking, cutting through the silence like a knife. “I want her  back!” I whirled around, but no one was there. The ball of fluff froze. Raised its head. And a  chocolate sea pierced my soul like an X-ray.  

“D-did you hear that?”  

The boy.  

No. Not a boy.  

Biscuit.  

14/6/1992  

Dear Diary, 

This is funny to write down, but I think I can talk to animals. Biscuit introduced me to this rabbit  they call Whizzle, and the next door cat Biscuit tussles with- Elizabeth.  

We were sitting in The Green, my legs splayed across the weathered yellow. The welcoming  scent of petrichor dallied with the fetid odour of the mud speckling the sharp-clawed snowball on  my chest.  

“You should move on, you know.” Liz’s unusually mellow brogue cradled me. Her sunset eyes  cut with a whetted shard of black were focused on the same star I searched for every night.  

My neck wettened as Whizzle nuzzled his pink nose to my chin. His fur warmed my neck and  my heart. “Let her be, Liz.” He bowed his snout, usually perky ears drooping. “She needs time.” 

And all of a sudden, I was framed by three unlikely critters; Whizzle on my chest, Liz at my arm,  pawing my hand, and Biscuit licking my forehead.  

It felt… good.  

It felt like home.  

And for the first time since Ma died, I smiled.  

8/2/1998  

Dear Diary,  

I died a little today.  

Screaming blood lights tore at my eyes. Blue, blue, everywhere, in the bedsheet, the walls, in  Ma’s eyes, in my soul, my heart. And blinding death white. 

Red, blue, white. The ambulance is burned into my memory.  

Biscuit’s dead.  

I think that’s when I gave up.  

I went to tell Whizzle and Liz today, barely able to walk to The Green, and stumbling and feeling  my way through the darkness. On a clear sunny day.  

And I grabbed Whizzle, and I screamed into his ears, my nails digging deep into his fur.  He recoiled. And then he- He squeaked.  

I never heard Whizzle or Liz speak again. 

My eyes are getting tired of seeing, and my mind tired of thinking. I twist two blades of grass  through my fingers. They’re dead anyways.  

The trees are looming over me, buzzing with clandestine whispers. And I look up at the stars,  and all I think of is Ma.  

Wrinkles line my sagging skin, and crow’s feet line my eyes, but I’m still the baby girl I always  was inside.  

And I’m relaxed. Ready to join her. More unfettered than I’ll ever be.  

“Am I really going to outlive you?”  

I look up. A scrawny, hunched tawny cat, with familiar acute amber eyes.  

And my eyes are getting blurry again. I can’t get up, but a sob chokes my throat. “Liz,” I  whimper like a child, “Liz, my best friend, I’ve missed you more than the world, I thought I had  hallucinated you, a-”  

Her eyes soften. 

“We never stopped talking,” her voice is barely a whisper. “You just forgot how to listen.”  I can feel my bleary eyes widen.  

“The moon sings, and we talk against the chorus of the stars.” Liz’s usually downturned snout  tugs upward. 

She nestles in the crook of my neck.  

And I feel complete.  

I feel home.  

I pluck the dandelion.

Cursed Angel  

Demon. Alien. Possessed. In sniggers and sly remarks and cruel pieces of paper with my  name scrawled. They wrote on glass shards that pierced me until I bled out. Now I was a  skeleton.  

The worst of the names was freak. Now it was being passed around the class like a scornful  laugh.  

And that was all I heard- the raucous cacophony of laughter. Time froze.  There I was. Suspended. 

My body moved of its own accord; I was an observer. I watched as the frail slender arms of a  scrawny boy went limp as a rag doll; his eyes glazed over.  

That’s all I was- a rag doll. The demon manipulates the strings of this useless puppet to dance for  my classmates. They cackle in glee. 

That’s my epilepsy. This curse.  

All I remember is fading from drinking an obsidian multiverse of floating lanterns, tourmaline,  and amethyst, finally unfettered, to my real galaxy.  

Half an hour later, I was walking, head bowed, on the cobbled pavement. 

I felt Aryan’s claw dig into my flesh, brutish face ecstatically red. He roared, “Did you see him?  He fell asleep!” 

His laugh got lost in tens of others as a crowd collected.  

His tone grew imperial. “I think we should punish him for pretending to have this weird disease.”  Calls of agreement rang out like a death knell. 

Piya, a burly girl, stormed out of the spattering.  

Next thing I knew, Aryan was muffling my voice with an iron grip as Piya swiped through my  bag. 

“Ooh, what’s this?” she giggled in a tinkling, plastic voice, grabbing the lunch box Mumma had  packed. 

The one Mumma gave me for my birthday. With the Star Wars characters on it.  I don’t watch Star Wars anymore. 

It’s still my favourite lunch box because it’s from her.  

Piya sneered. “Oooh, baby watches Star Wars.”

I closed my eyes. “Don’t do anything... please!” 

Piya laughed. It was laced with thorns.  

She walked to the pond. 

I saw it in slow motion. 

She began emptied the contents, and then she tossed the lunch box into the weed and muck. She  dusted her hands, proud of her work, and the little group walked off, sniggering. 

Leaving me in their dust.  

I just wanted to be friends with them. 

Half an hour later, I was still crouched there. My tears bounced off the little pebbles and into  puddles.  

I was a baby. 

I heard footsteps getting louder behind me.  

I whipped my head around, prepared for the worst.  

That’s not what I saw. 

A plump, shivering boy.  

Covered head to toe in swamp slime. 

Hair plastered to his forehead.  

“Hi. I’m Rohan…” 

He revealed a small, grubby muffin, panting. 

“I saw you missed lunch… this was all I could steal.” 

His face was blue. 

But his eyes sparkled.  

His voice shook.  

“F-friends?” 

My mind went blank. 

I couldn’t recall the last time someone asked me that.

His face sank. 

My face broke as I started half laughing, half crying in awful snorts as I grinned, “Friends.  Always.” 

As water ran down his chubby cheeks, he smiled, and it was the purest smile I had ever seen. For in one proud hand, he held a muddy wet lunch box.

Anastasia  

History’s so boring. It’s absolutely useless. Why would I care about dead people?  

I mindlessly leafed through pages of my history textbook. Letters floated across the sea of  sentences, the crest of each wave rising and crashing… scintillas of ink crawled across the pages  in lines, each letter an ant. I dragged my finger across the page. Smash! One ant dead. Smash!  Two more. I chuckled and rubbed the drowsiness out of my eyes, trying to zero in on a  paragraph. Bolsheviks… tyranny… gah. Next paragraph. Romanov family… photoshoot…  assassination…whatever…  

…I was floating in a sempiternal infinity, drinking the galaxy… the stars, they’re  lanterns…swimming in the ever cascading river of time itself…no, drowning…  

“Madam Anastasia!” 

Huh? 

“Your Imperial Highness, wake up!”  

The voice was raspy and croaking, an alien language- guttural syllables, a lilting familiar accent.  But I… understood. What a bizarre dream. I muttered something garbled. That wasn’t English! I  held back my shriek. German… no, Russian…perhaps? For the second time in a minute, I almost  screamed. My blood curdled. It was cold. A frail wooden excuse for a chair fought to remain  

standing. The dearth of furniture- or warmth- sent an icy finger down my spine, not just because  of how freezing it was. I shivered under the flimsy… what? Austere, ivory sleeves hugged my  arms and morphed into a gown which bit my wrists and unfurled. Where… was I?  

Fingernails dug into my flesh. A raven faced woman with cheekbones that could slice paper  looked at me. She wore a homely carmine dress. The palour of her sunken midnight eyes, the  hunger in her pressed lips… “It’s Viktoriya, Madam Romanov…”  

Romanov…  

“Madam Ana, we’re having a photoshoot, with the family. You must wake up.” I painfully  smiled. “I’m sorry, but… you’re mistaken.”  

“I’m not this Anatashi-”  

“Miss Anastasia.” Her voice as sharp as those cheekbones. “Are you alright? It would do you  good to have the doctor visit.” 

I shuddered and swung out of bed. “I’m fine. A photoshoot...?” 

“Yes, Madam Romanov.” 

That name again… Romanov. 

The Romanov family. A Russian family from the1800s, shot to death… at a “photoshoot”.  Knives pierced my flesh as she dragged me. Her hands were weathered and icy, her eyes even  colder. If I let her take me to the photoshoot… 

Every ounce of blood in my body went up in flames. 

I hardened my expression. “I know what you’re planning.” 

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snarled.  

“There is no photoshoot- but we will certainly…” I whispered coolly “…be shot.” The crazed  cackling of a raven broke the silence. She slammed me into the wall. A crest of flames rose and  crashed sharply in my neck as the nape got wet. My head lolled. “You know too much.”  

Her dangerous smile pierced my skin more than the wound. 

“I’ve wanted to strangle you myself for a very long time… princess.” 

She wound her skeletal fingers around my neck. 

Everything went black. The pain was dizzying, and now bloody was steadily oozing out my  wound. I gasped for anything, for oxygen, for life. My flesh was on fire, charred to the core.  

No. A family was depending on me for survival. My ears rang with her psychotic roars. I opened  my eyes. They were now shining. Viktoriya saw the pain I was in and the ice-cold flame in her  eyes flickered. In that moment, her grip loosened.  

I saw stars. I saw hope. 

I mustered up some courage and lashed forth with my foot. 

Her face froze and she screeched, buckling down. She wasn’t a young woman, and her  face contorted into even more wrinkles.  

This was my chance.  

A chair. In the corner of the room. I blocked out the agony and lunged.  Within seconds, I charged at Viktoriya and slammed the chair upon her.  The wooden back dug into her chin and the handles fettered her down.  

I watched the colour fade from Viktoriya’s face. Her expression softened. For a second, she  looked ten years younger.  

“Princess… I’ve wanted to kill you for a long time.” Her eyes glazed with tears. But not angry  tears. “I could not have killed you either way. You remind me,” she wept, “too much of  Alyona.” 

“My daughter… my angel… she was the light of my life.” Viktoriya’s smile held a thousand  different songs of poignance and lost memories. “Until your father,” her eyes darkened, “Tsar  Nicholas, killed her.” 

“What right did he have to take the life of a young girl, just because she was hungry and tried to  stealsome food?” she whispered in agony. “I pledged allegiance to the Bolsheviks who plan to  kill your family,” she continued, hanging her head, “and vowed to help them.” 

“I don’t care if I die. I’ve been waiting to be reunited with my Aly far too long.” My heart tore.  

“Viktoriya.” I flung the chair off. “You’ve been suffering the pain of a life lost for decades now.  Do you want to spend the rest with the burden of six more?”  

“Alyona deserved life. Life which my father may have robbed,” I felt my cheeks get wet. “I  deserve what Alyona deserved. I deserve a father. A mother. I deserve… life. Do you think this  is what Alyona would have wanted?”  

Viktoriya extended one slender hand to cup my cheek- this time with more gentleness than  when she last touched it. A mother’s cradle. “Do you know what Alyona means?” She smiled.  “…hope.”  

“I tried to kill you. But I saw your eyes…” she went on. “They blazed with hope. I saw Alyona’s  eyes today.” 

“Viktoriya,” my voice was barely a whisper. “Help us escape.” 

“Mom- um, Mother! Father!” I bellowed into the passageway Viktoriya led me to. A befuddled  set of regal-looking people stood before me. “Viktoriya, you said there was a secret exit in a  wall, right?” She nodded. “I’ll alert them. Open that door.” 

Within minutes, Viktoriya was ushering us out a thrust open door. I was thirsty for sunlight, and  it washed all over me in a golden shower.  

It felt… warm.  

It felt like hope. 

“Father, Mother,” The man who ironically had the mane of a lion, was trembling, and the woman  had a fragile expression. “We won’t die today.”  

And the sky exploded. The most chilling scream I have ever heard tore my ears. A bullet.  Viktoriya looked at me somberly. “Go.” 

“Come!” I protested. “They’ll kill you!” 

She smiled sadly. “I’ll distract them. They’ll catch up to you.”  

“Don’t do this for us!” 

“I’m not doing it for you.” She turned around, but I felt the determination explode in her face.  “I’m doing it for Alyona.” 

Six fugitives, running and scrambling and begging for life, for freedom. The wind whipped the  tears off my face as we ran. 

I had saved their lives.  

I ran towards the horizon and didn’t stop running. Fierce flames of red and gold turned into  obsidian as I grew delirious, but I ran, and ran … 

“Tara! Earth to Tara!” 

Ms. Mayuri. 

Ugh. A dream. I jolted up electrically.  

“If you were paying attention, you’d know the Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. He and his family  were in confinement by the Bolsheviks before they died.” 

She smiled sadistically. “Now, do you know how they died?” 

Pfft. Of course.  

“Shot to death,” I sang. 

To my horror… 

“Trick question. Their cause of death is unknown.” 

What?  

I opened my mouth to protest. “They escaped confinement on the day they would have been  executed.” 

“However, legend goes,” she continued, “that they were helped that day by a resourceful  young member of the royal family and lived out the rest of their lives in peace.” 

She smiled, and now it was pure.  

“She stands today as a beacon of hope for freedom and courage.” 

“And her name…” 

My breath caught. 

“…was Anastasia.”

By Tanisha Desai