Butterflies: Giving Words Wings
Giving Words Wings
| Why do I try to give flight to Such thoughts With these twisted words that have No wings? Wishing upon a star which Is no more than a flaming, Twinkling, Ball of gas? Thriving, working like a little ant Who has No thoughts, Not knowing when to stop. Me, not caring When to stop Trying to give words wings |
Celestia
The Dolphinian
By Celestia
I used to think life was simple.
Reading my books, writing my stories, a little T.V and music on the side. Oh sure, there was homework and studying, just a little bit, but my private tutor- Wanda- used to say, jokingly, "Oh, a future Olympic swimmer shouldn't study too hard."Olympic swimmer. Ha! Truth is, I don't even like water all that much. Sure, I swim a few hours a day, but I'd never get in the water at all if it weren't for the dolphins. The dolphins.Those beautiful, acrobatic, graceful swimmers that everyone talks about and loves. But how many people have even seen a dolphin? How many people have swam with a dolphin? And how many people have been a dolphin? I'll back up a bit. I live with my dad and Wanda on a houseboat out in the Florida Keys. We only stop on land about once a month, sometimes even less. I love it. My parents split when I was five. I lived with my mom and my little sister, Jamie, until I was seven. My older sister, Anna, had been living with my dad on the houseboat until then. Until she drowned.At least, that's what everybody said had happened. There was no body. My dad said it washed away. Then he asked me if I wanted to live there with him. I had begged and pleaded before, so of course I was ecstatic. Mom was reluctant, saying, "We'll lose her too." Something about the tone of her voice...it bothered me for a long time. Finally I was allowed to go, and I've stayed here for eight years. My friends write me. I pick up my mail at the port we stop at once a month. They're so jealous. Let them be jealous. I've got the dolphins. I remember that first night. The first night I made a connection with them. I was about ten. It was late at night, and I was lying in bed. I never sleep, really. Wanda always said that I was nocturnal. I sleep during the day. Anyway, I was lying in bed, thinking up ideas for stories and things. I have this little laptop, where I can write and play games and get e-mail from various relatives. It runs off cheap batteries, like our T.V and my CD player. Of course, we must have a couple hundred batteries stored up, just to last from month to month. I swear if you open the cupboard above our small fridge, you'll be buried in batteries. I got sidetracked again.Anyway, I was lying there, and I saw something. Just out of the corner of my eye, looking in the porthole. Dolphins swim by all the time. so this was nothing new, but this dolphin was different somehow. I looked over. Something was familiar. But how could that be? Then I saw it's eyes. They weren't dolphin eyes. They weren't that beautiful pitch-black kind of eye you could be hypnotized by just looking at it. No, they were human eyes. They were...Annika's. I didn't remember much of Annika. But I'll always remember her eyes. They were a deep, deep, deep, brown, almost black. My mother always said that they were beautiful eyes. There was something else about this dolphin. Her face. It seemed to have that same playful smile...the way Annika used to smile at me.Was Annika a dolphin? I remember asking my dad about it the next morning. "Dad, do you think that people can grow flippers and fins and swim underwater, like dolphins?" Dad looked down at me, a smile on his face. He ruffled my honey-brown hair, my namesake. "Honey, sweetheart, I think you've watched The Little Mermaid a few too many times." He sipped his coffee. I remember that, later, he and Wanda had a good laugh over it. I laughed too, then. But inside I was determined to prove them wrong. Every day after that, when I was swimming, I saw the Annika-dolphin. She seemed to stay close to me, closer than the other dolphins ever did. I thought that it was cool to have a dolphin friend. So did my jealous friends on shore. This, this lazy-hazy way of living, continued for what seemed like forever. It was four years, actually. Then it all started to change. I was fourteen. It was about 12:00 at night. I was standing at the bow of the boat, staring out at the seemingly endless water, the wind blowing through my honey-brown hair. I love that feeling, the wind blowing through my hair. It makes me feel like I can fly. My dad was just going inside. "Night, Hon." He knew that I would go in eventually. I stayed out there for a while after that. The water looked so calm, so inviting. I decided to go for a swim. I'm not really supposed to go for a swim when everyone else is below deck. But the water looked so inviting. Besides, if anything happened, the dolphins would save me. I was already wearing a bathing suit, so I just dived on in. That's the thing about living on a houseboat. You go swimming a lot, so you're always wearing a bathing suit. So I jumped right on in, off our diving board. And then something weird happened.I felt this...tingling sensation in my legs. I reached back, thinking that it was a bug or something else that needed to be swatted. But, when my hand made contact, it definitely did not feel like my leg. I looked back, and what I saw was shocking. I didn't have legs, instead I had a tail.A dolphin's tail.And fins.Dolphin's fins. And by the time I hit the water. I even had the bottle-like nose and playful face of a dolphin. I was a dolphin!This is so cool! I thought. I knew it had to be a dream, but it was the best dream I'd ever had and it was so realistic! I could feel the water on my skin, and it was just like the feeling of the wind in my hair. Like I could just soar. So I did.I did flips, turns and jumps. I leapt right out of the water, and turned around for a graceful re-entry. I definitely didn't want to wake up from this dream! I swam underwater for a bit, trying to get used to the fact that I had flippers and a tail instead of arms and legs. It was, amazingly, easy. I guess that someone who's spent most of her life in the water already feels like she has flippers. I noticed that, for all this time, I had been swimming alone. And suddenly, there was noise. It was like beautiful music, and I somehow figured out that the music was being made by the dolphins. They were speaking to each other...they were speaking to me. Suddenly, all those clicks and whirrs that had always sounded like, well, clicks and whirrs had assembled into voices. "Honey?" I heard a voice call out from behind me. That voice sounded vaguely familiar. "Annika?" I questioned. I whirled around and there was the Annika-dolphin. But I knew that she wasn't just 'the Annika-dolphin' anymore. She was Annika! "Honey!" She exclaimed. "You've finally joined us." Truth be told, I was really confused. Joined them? Joined what? This was all just a dream, wasn't it? "Come." She started swimming ahead of me. "We have a lot to talk about." So we talked for a while, and I soon discovered that this was no dream. She told me what I really was. "We call ourselves Dolphinians. Most of the dolphins here are Dolphinians." "I'm still confused." I told her. "Am I going to be a dolphin forever?" "No, not unless you want to be. You know about werewolves, right? Well, we're were-dolphins, we just prefer not to be called that." She told me that this was hereditary, and that it was a part of my mother's family. All the females in the family, except for the youngest, gets to change, to be Dolphinians. I was disappointed that Jamie would never get this chance. I was also disappointed that my aunts have to do this, but never my mother. Maybe she would have understood me better if she hadn't been a bit jealous that I would get what she could never have. We talked for a while more, just about nothing, until I got to the topic of Dad. She turned to me, a frightened look in her eyes. "Be careful of Dad." "Why? What do you mean Annika? Shouldn't I tell him? I wasn't planning to. He'd probably think I was nuts!" "Not just that. Be careful, Honey. He's trying to kill us." "But we're his daughters. Surely he-" "Not us. The dolphins. And the Dolphinians. Don't you see, Honey? He is a dolphin poacher! He hunts us down, catches us in nets. Apparently, dolphin burgers and such are delicacies in some places." I could not believe it. I would not believe it. This was my father; this was Dad we were talking about. Yet I knew, when I looked into those human eyes, strangely out of place on a dolphin face, that she was telling the truth. "I'll be careful," I promised, and nodded my head. "Good. It's getting late. You should probably get back." "How do I change back?" "Just think about it and float to the surface. It'll work. See you tomorrow?" I nodded and floated upwards. After I got back in the boat, I went into my tiny quarters and crawled into my small bed. But it was impossible to sleep. In fact, I've never slept since that day. It's not just the insomnia that I used to have, then I at least slept a bit, now I just don't sleep. And I never feel the least bit tired. I never could swim while in human form again. It just didn't feel right. But every night, I snuck out of my quarters and onto the deck, then dived in and transformed. It soon became my reward, the reward for living through the day, because the days were becoming more and more unbearable. Mainly because of my father. I couldn't quite accept what Annika had said about him, but I soon found out that it was true. One day, two or three months after that first night, I asked him what we were having for lunch. "Burgers." He said. Then I noticed that he had our little barbecue out and was flipping burgers. Then I remembered what Annika had told me. He was cooking dolphin burgers! I gulped, then asked "What kind of burgers?" I was sure of the answer I would get, and I was afraid of it. "You'll love this," he said with genuine enthusiasm. Sure I will, I thought. "They're considered a delicacy. I went to a lot of trouble to get them. But I just had to let you and Wanda try them. They're delicious!" He made that motion that French chefs make. You know, when they bring their fingers up to their lips, and spread them out wide, pucker their lips and make a kissing noise. It loses it's elegance when I explain it. "They're dolphin burgers. But don't let this get around to your friends on shore, okay sweetheart? They might get a little too jealous." "Dad, aren't those illegal?" I tried to sound nonchalant, although I was sick to my stomach. He smiled at me. I wondered how he could. I mean, that might be one of my friends he was flipping! "That's why we probably shouldn't tell too many people." He patted me on the back. "So, is one enough? I can cook up some more if you like." I managed a small smile, although I'm not sure how. "Thanks Dad. But, are there any more of those little fish we had last night? Those were pretty good." "What? You mean those disgusting things that you ate raw and I thought were horrible, even when I cooked mine? Yeah, there's some left. But, you'll never know what you're missing." Yeah, I thought. And I don't want to. I grabbed the fish from the small fridge in our cramped kitchen and went outside to eat them. I had decided I liked raw fish. If it's good enough for the dolphins, it's good enough for me. I held the plate full of fish in my hand, alternately stuffing my face and feeding them to the dolphins (and Dolphinians) that were swimming around the boat. I thought of all of the stuff that Annika had taught me. The Dolphinians pod was made up of the various Dolphinians who lived in the area, and a few real dolphins, although there weren't very many of those. There were about 23 families in the world that had the Dolphinians gene and mine was the oldest. That meant that the Dolphinians from my family were treated as royalty, and were the leaders of the pod. The current leader was Annika, and I was her predecessor. I was treated like a princess every night. In fact, I was a princess. Dolphinians are practically immortal. They can't die of old age. They can only die if they are caught in an accident, catch a bad disease, starve, or are killed by a predator. In fact, we have many edges over real dolphins, and we are practically worshipped by them, although many of the Dolphinians find this pretty stupid. After all, we weren't there to be worshipped. We were there, enjoying our dolphin form, because we liked dolphins, and the cool feeling you get when you are one. Most of the Dolphinians were like Annika. They had decided that it was way better to be a dolphin than a human and stayed in dolphin form all the time. Some, like me, only took dolphin form at night. There were very few like that, though. Then there were the gossips.These Dolphinians stayed in dolphin form most of the time, but occasionally took human form and went to the surface. They would check out how your family and friends were doing while they were there, for a price. Money was no good under the sea, so you had to pay them in fish. That was okay, fish were pretty plentiful in our waters. But, if you didn't pay them, there could be dire consequences. For you, and your family. I remembered the conversation that Annika and I'd had the night before about them. "Stay away from them Honey," she cautioned. "They'll cause you nothing but trouble, pain, and sorrow." "But what if I want to find out something? What if I want to know what's up with Mom or Jamie?" Annika had shook her head. "If you absolutely have to, then take human form and go find out yourself. There are a few gossips that are okay, but you never can tell when you're talking to a bad one. There's no way to tell. Honey, stay away from them! If you ever get on their bad side, even if you never asked them for anything, they'll never forgive you for it." Her warnings rang out strongly as I sat on the bow of the boat, remembering. I knew that, even if I eventually chose to stay a dolphin, I would have little use for gossips. Besides, as leader of the pod, Annika was trying her hardest to drive them out. By the time I permanently joined the pod, they would probably be all gone. I finished my fish and went to my room. I hooked up my little computer, then checked my e-mail. Nothing. Nobody sent me stuff anymore. I casually wondered why, but didn't dwell on it. I logged off and opened one of the stories in which I was currently working. I hadn't been able to write for ages, probably around the time, I found out that I was a Dolphinian. I mean, why write out your fantasies when you're living one every night? The story I had opened was an old one. I had been working on it on and off for a year or so. It had originally been a project Wanda had given me. "Write your autobiography," she had said. "With a few twists thrown in." I had never handed in the project. After a while, it had become pretty personal. It wasn't just a story, I felt as if it were a part of me. Little pieces of my soul arranged into words. More than just those mandatory autobiographies that my friends had been forced to write in grade 5. This story had pretty much everything that had ever happened to me in it. Everything that I remembered, anyway. It had become sort of a diary, I wrote down my daily frustrations from the point of view of the story's main character, Lindsay. It also had those "twists" Wanda had mentioned, little fantasies of mine coming true.I read over the story so far, which was really long. One of the longest stories I've ever written. It really was my life down on paper, even if it was a little bit better than reality. Right then, my life was better than most people's realities. Whole lots better. I positioned my hands on the keyboard, and began to type out a new chapter of my life. I discovered that I had missed writing, and getting back to it was another form of soaring. Especially writing this chapter. This chapter, which everyone would think of as fantasy, was truth. I had no way of knowing that my fantasy-like life was about to become almost as horrible as reality. The next night, same as always, I took dolphin form and went for a swim. I hung out with some of my new Dolphinian friends. Caught a few fish for a nighttime snack, then headed off to find Annika. Annika usually strayed away from the pod, she hated the way most of them treated her, all condescending and such. Annika only had a few real friends in the pod, and I was privileged enough to be one of them. Not all sisters are as close as we were. Before I knew about this Dolphinian thing, I hadn't remembered much about her. Now we were practically best friends. This was terrific. I don't think I could ever have had a better friend than her. Anyway, I swam off to look for her, calling her name the whole way. But I couldn't find her. She wasn't at her usual meeting point by the small shipwreck, and she wasn't anywhere else, either. I was beginning to get worried. She was usually so happy to see me. Why was she hiding from me like this? "Annika! Annika!" To any humans who just happened to be listening, it would sound like I was singing. But I wasn't. To me, and to any other dolphins or Dolphinians, it sounded like I was worriedly screaming. And I was. I spotted two Dolphinians snickering nearby. I vaguely recognized them. They were Natasha and Leslie, two well-known gossips. And I suddenly realized...the were laughing at me. While I was frantically searching for Annika, they were laughing. Had Annika somehow offended the gossips? Had they done something to her? I didn't want to think that, but I had to. I quickly swam up to them. I was panicking. Don't panic, Honey. I told myself. Don't panic. I swam right up to their faces. When they noticed that I was there, they stopped laughing. Instead, their faces both turned into frightening sneers. I ignored (or tried to) the fact that I knew exactly what they both were, and instead pretended that they were moral, correct citizens of Annika's pod. But it was hard. "Do you know where Annika is?" I tried to keep the panic out of my voice. I don't think it worked very well. They both broke out into laughter at the deep concern in my voice. Natasha sneered (boy, did she ever have an evil sneer!) and looked at her counterpart. "Maybe...check out the Capara Caves. " She looked at Leslie, and they seemed to share a secret. "You might want to get there fast," she continued. "And remember....SWIM SAFE!!!" They ended in unison. I gave them one last searing look and swam away as fast as I could. The Capara Caves were an area that I usually liked to stay away from. Far away from. They were too dark and menacing for me. And now, because of what I found there at that moment, I go even farther out of my way to miss them. It was a long swim to the caves. I finally reached them, and started screaming out her name again. "Annika! Annika!" There was no answer. Maybe Natasha and Leslie were just pulling my fins after all. But something in my gut told me otherwise. I swam deeper into the caves, wishing to see any sign. In the end, I didn't see any signs. Instead, I heard one. It was a slight groaning noise, and it was coming from inside the deepest reaches of the caves. I swam as fast as I could, but by then, I was tired, and I knew I was already too late. I found her in one of the open-topped caverns. A fisherman's (or a poacher's, I thought bitterly) net had been set up there, and Annika was caught in it.I wanted to help her, but here's the limitation of being a dolphin or even a Dolphinian: no hands. No ability to use knives to cut her out, and no hands to try to untie the lines. And even if I had been in human form, and had the hands to untie her, there was no way that I would have been able to hold my breath that long. The conversation we had that night is one of my most vivid memories. She knew she was dying in that net, we both knew it, and there was nothing we could do about it. Heck, it might have been our father that set the net. But we both knew it was Natasha's and Leslie's fault that Annika was caught in it. She said that the only reason they had set this up was out of spite. She hadn't even forgotten to pay them for a service or anything. They just hated her, and no longer wanted her for a leader. They were hoping that now one of them would become a leader of the local Dolphinian pod. "Honey," she said, her voice full of tears. "Tell me you'll make sure that never happens." "I will," I said, and my voice was equally sad, if not more so. And she knew that I would keep my word. She said something else too. "You're the rightful leader of the pod now, you know. And they'll try to take you out of the picture too. You're the Queen,now. It's now you're job to lead them, and to fulfill the promise that I made to my people that I couldn't keep. You have to put your foot down about those gossips. Run them out of this sea, Honey. I know you can do it." She had a gleam in her eye. You know, that gleam that the actors playing coaches and other inspirational people in movies try to have, but can't really fake. But that gleam was there, in Annika's eyes, and in full force. I nodded my head, and realized that there were no tears. For the first time since I discovered I was a Dolphinian, I missed part of my human self. I missed being able to cry. We talked about so many things that night. It was like having a sleepover with my friends, except for that thing weighing down our hearts. And that thing was the fact that this was our last conversation ever. She didn't ask to be brought food or anything. Perhaps she almost wanted to die. Also, it wasn't as if it was just starvation against her, it was a small net. The hole that she had somehow got stuck in wasn't nearly as big as she was. It was already starting to cut into her and by the end of our conversation early that morning, a red mist surrounded us from her blood. Nevertheless, we'd had an interesting conversation, and I now knew what I had to do. That morning I morphed back into my human form for the last time. The last time that mattered, anyway. I crawled up the swim ladder back into the boat. It was only 6am or so, and no one was up yet. It had been that way since this whole Dolphinian thing started, and I was glad. It would have made things a whole lot more complicated if I'd had to explain myself to them. Truth was, I had no idea why I was going back up there. It wasn't as if I needed anything. Not anything as in my stuff, anyway. But I think it was because I needed an ending. To tell myself that, yes, this passage of my life was over. To sit down, take a deep breath, and say goodbye to the place that had been my whole world for a little over eight years. I wondered if this was how Annika felt before she'd had to leave it all behind. Perhaps there wasn't this grief in her heart, maybe she has to choose to leave, to stay in dolphin form all the time. But for me, I had no choice. I was heir to the throne. The current owner of the throne had died.That made me Queen of the Dolphinians. I took that deep breath, took one last look around, and dived in, waving goodbye on my way down. I thought that being the Queen would be hard. A major sacrifice, or at least something along the lines of that.And sometimes it has been. Sometimes it's been hell. Sometimes it's been merely a challenge, a welcome challenge from the usual monotony of human life. Sometimes it's been so easy, all I had to do was swim and eat fish. Nothing wrong with that! And I never had to touch a nasty schoolbook again. The thing that was the hardest to do was run the gossips out of the pod. Some days, it was so hard that I thought I should just give up, not even try to get rid of them. But I had promised Annika. And a promise that I made to her on her deathbed was one that I knew I could never, never break. And I did it! About 2 months ago, all of us, the moral, upstanding citizens of the pod, watched them swim far, far away, and we were laughing at them as they had laughed at us for so long. I had put them out of business, no one used their services anymore. I helped alleviate the Dolphinians fears of taking human form from time to time. Now we could check out family happenings by ourselves. I prayed to all the gods that I had ever heard of that none of them ever came back again. I shouldn't try to make this sound like my victory. It was really Annika's. She was already really close to getting rid of those gossips. I just helped make that final step, stomping them out for good. It was a glorious day, that day when we watched them all run away. But not quite as glorious as the day just one week ago, where all of the members of the pod helped put an end to the dolphin poaching business.We had found the latest location of my Dad's houseboat. He had moved it, probably because he knew the whole Dolphinian story, and never wanted to chance seeing Annika or me again while he was swimming or trying to sleep, staring out his porthole. But, as much as he was trying to hide the boat, we found it. And, even though it was my Dad and Wanda living in there, two people that I loved, I knew that I had to have revenge, revenge for all the Dolphinians and dolphins that had died at their hands.So we did. Now I am in human form, writing for the first time in a couple of years. But I had to get this story out. I had a large bank account when I was younger, and the amount of interest in it now...the couple of nights I'm spending in this awful; dry hotel won't make a dent. The news is on, although I'm not watching it, anymore. I already saw the interesting story. It was on the news a few minutes ago "Today we found the two missing people we have been telling you about for the past three days. Mark Patterson and Wanda Morgan were found on a small island, barely big enough for camping, just off the Florida Keys, where their houseboat went down just over a week ago. Police are saying they're delirious, spouting stories about dolphins taking revenge on them and tipping over their boat. When asked why they would want to exact revenge, Mr. Patterson practically begged for the police to arrest him, and Wanda, winding a story of dolphin poaching, illegal sales of the meat, and flipping burgers. He began then to tell us stories of his two oldest daughters, both of which have been victims of drowning. He tried to tell the police that they were actually dolphins, which they had pushed over his boat. Ms. Morgan nodded her head vigorously to all of this. Mr. Patterson and Ms. Morgan have both been admitted to the Opiter Mental Institute." The reporter then turned to his colleague, shaking his head and commenting on what a strange story that was.I smiled. So we were finally being noticed. Good.I thought about what I was going to do tomorrow. Go back to my home, the warm waters of the ocean, , and tell stories of this to my people.Then I could do flips to my heart's content, swim around, catch a few fish; talk to all my friends.
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