The outside world was far too pretty for Mina’s heart. If she were to step outside, her heart would race a hundred miles a minute and then burst inside its heavily guarded muscle. If she were to dance outside or jump and run her hands over the foxtails that grew in the dip around the hill, Mina’s bones would snap under the weight of her efforts. She was made to paint and write indoors. Her inspiration always just out of reach.
That’s why her Papa gave her this little cottage on the island where they can build a house made almost completely of glass. That way, every wall was a window and it would feel as if she was there, outside completely. Mina slept and bathed in the only two rooms made of wood. They stood encased in the near transparent walls and rooms so that it looked as if the cottage itself was two rose wood colored boxes stranded in a field of lost belongings. A passing stranger would see them stood in a strange maze of neatly laid furniture, paint pots, and girl’s clothes looking like a doll house cracked open to the sky and forgotten in the fields to be overgrown with daisies.
Mina herself seemed more doll than human. Her limbs so fragile they seemed made of porcelain. She had swept back hair that curled naturally and rustled as she bent her head forward or reached up to retrieve a book. Her face, much like a doll’s, was simple and plain, perfect for the mass market because it was neither offensive nor stimulating. She wasn’t quite as beautiful as her ceramic cousins, but in her light delicate lashes and soft rose dandy on her cheeks there was something there that compelled one to take care of her.
Where she differed from dolls was that her skin proved sunshine bitten. There were freckles on her arms and legs where the noonday sun ran over her. Her hair was bleached red by the many days she spent laboring over her paintings under the sun. She was far from doll as any, and her greatest difference was that she had blood running through her veins and while weak, a pumping pulsing heart. Mina was a girl more alive than most, and on the days she had to pull out metal gears and pressure boxes to measure her heart, she blessed the faint points of pulses against her wrists that she still was alive for the most part. Mina would never allow herself to wither away, because she believed that one day she would have a wonderful life outside. The messy bit was that she was unsure how to test this.
It was raining today. Mina hated the rain. It has a tendency to drum relentlessly against her windows and sky drowning out the already mild beating of her heart to oblivion. From her seat in the fall of sheets upon sheets of water, Mina could see a dark figure perching a boat by the shore below. It shakily climbed the slopes of stone.
The island vibrated with color in the rain. It was known as the Emerald to the locals on the main land, because the grass and trees drank up the wind, sun, and rain and bulged in crystal transparence. A hunched man in a navy trench coat found his way to the door. He moved slowly as if his knees didn’t work quite right. Mina stood with her hands smudging the thick glass and her breath fogging up her stretching grin.
“Papa!”
She thrusted open the door before he even made it halfway up the hill. This sent a thrill of fear through the old man. He scrambled through the mud and quickly shut the door as soon as he ran in.
“Mina my darling! Be careful of the weather. The doctor would not be pleased if you came down with pneumonia. again.”
But he smiled as he loosened the dripping trench from his shoulders. Papa soaked up every drop of water from himself, even the pieces in his beard before wrapping his daughter into his arms. Papa had lost two children to a failing marriage, but Mina stayed with him. Mina with her poor health, meant the world to Papa. And while he himself lived in a small mechanical shop in shambles on the mainland, it was a castle he had built for Mina.
ink and toast 