TEXT

I opened my eyes and there she was. She has always been there. The bittersweet taste of orange, the subtle smell of jasmine and freshly laundry drying in the summer sun, it was all her. She was that tiny piece of delicious pumpkin pie that got stuck to the back of my tooth and the rosy, rough hands that braided my hair and held me to balance on my first bike. The salty wind blowing from the seaside, the freshly mopped floors and the lit, cosy fireplace. But, more than anything, she was her fairy tales.

My grandmother would gather all us children in our fully bloomed yard on these warm breeze summer nights and would narrate the stories and fairy tales of our little village.  Mystical folk tales of white horses tormented by ghostly spirits and bathing fairies that would take a man’s voice forever if he saw them naked in the river. Tales about fate and dragon slayers, about how our village was once built up in the clouds, tales that her words were weaving, shiny stiches of our childhood, deeply encarved on the village’s cultural fabric.

It was in one of those nights that I was laying carefree on our yard’s big hammock, swinging back and forth, immersed in another narration and the unearthly sounds of the garden’s little creatures, when our neighbour, auntie Polyxeni, a short, delicate lady whose long, white hair were touching the ground, frisked about the front door of our fence bringing news. I could faintly hear what she was gabbering about but it was something related to the gate of the old mill down by the cornfields. Some farmers, she said, had seen again that little red calf flying away from the old mill towards the rocky beach. The news upset my grandmother who got up from her rocking chair and went to the front door limping, while wrapping the shawl around her shoulders. A bubbling rustle had been caused to the listeners of the fairy tale, a rustle that slowly became a fusion of distant sounds from laughs and footsteps, leaves crackling and bicycle wheels moving away. I wanted to go with them, down to the cornfields, to see the legendary little red calf for myself, to make sure that it was more than a folk tale, but my feet were sewn to the hammock and my breath was getting heavier and heavier, becoming one with the smell of. I tried to call my grandmother, or I did call her, before diving into the bottomless well of a deep sleep.

And she had stayed with me all night.  Her hands were too aethereal to curry me upstairs in the house, yet she didn’t want to leave me on my own so she found her space on the hammock and covered us both with my favourite green blanket. And when the morning sunlight caressed my forehead and the rooster’s crow tore through my thin, dreamy nebula and woke me up, I opened my eyes and there she was.

GENERATIVE ART IMAGES CREATED BY AI BYINPUTTING THE TEXT ABOVE