Evenings were always taken for granted on Atlantis. We usually fell asleep before the sky could begin to darken, so we never appreciated how wonderful the night sky was. Today, though, we had a reason to stay up late—Grandma’s poems. Well that, and because I took a nap earlier, my body wasn’t ready to fall asleep at its usual time, and Darrius wouldn’t leave me alone to stay up by myself.
So we stayed and read.
Darrius had already finished healing most, if not all, of the pages, so now all we had to do was read.
“It’s not too dark,” Darrius said, examining the book. “I thought it would be, but it isn’t. The moon and stars are enough light.”
He’s right; there was enough light. As I lay on my back and watched him, I could see almost all of his features, and even some of the words on the page. I wished I had the powers that Darrius did; his power was so flexible, he could do anything from saving lives to drying a wet book. Me? All I could do was worry.
It sucked.
“I want to read all of these tonight.” He told me. We could—I wasn’t sleepy, and even if he got sleepy, his zeal would keep him awake. But did I want to? Wouldn’t it be better to take these poems one at a time?
“Let’s take them slowly, just one for tonight.” I offered. Darrius shrugged, still flipping through the pages to check if he missed anything. We sat on Brim of Atlantis, where our new hammock was finally hanging between two trees. There was no sand here for me to dig my feet into, but the fertile soil served as enough. The water sparkled as it streamed by us, making soft whooshing noises that you’d hear on a CD to help people fall asleep. I wanted to ask Darrius what made the water sparkle that way, if it was the stars or something actually beneath the water, but he seemed so focused on his task. It made me smile, the way he was interested in what my Grandmother had to say.
“What did she mean, Darrius?” I questioned, sitting up now. “What did she mean by ‘a bee amongst birds’?”
He closed the book and looked at me with a smile. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, actually. I don’t know how she meant it for sure, but I interpret it this way: the people around her are all birds. There are millions of them, these birds. And she’s just one bee, flying in the midst of the birds. That means that she’s different, obviously. But you wouldn’t be able to see the bee with those birds, right?”
“No, it would just appear as a lot of birds.”
“Exactly, so I think she’s seeing that while she’s different, she doesn’t stand out. She blends in with the crowd to the point where she’s unnoticeable, invisible.” Darrius paused to smile, not at me, but at the book. As if he could see my grandmother herself. What if he could, anyway? It wouldn’t be that hard to believe. “These poems are beautiful.”
“Read me another.”
As though he had been just waiting for me to ask, Darrius assumed his notorious poem-reading position—lying down horizontally, his head on my belly and his legs outstretched. He flipped to a random page and began to read.
“If there was no air for five seconds, our pool would overflow with the bees that she hates/
Now large, now ready to take her best and worst/
If there was no air for five seconds, I couldn’t hear you knock on the wooden reality/
But you wouldn’t be there to breathe air and hold me/
And for those five seconds, the world would be alright; for it isn’t she that is wrong, it is us/
Without us, it is alright again/
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