The Girl in the Castle

A short story about a little girl in castle on a forgotten island.

Once upon a time, in a place far, far away, there was an island. The name and existence of this island had long since been forgotten by the rest of the world and the rest of the world had been forgotten by this island. In the courtyard of the castle, there were various fruit trees and vegetable gardens that could be harvested all year around. It never snowed on the island and the climate was always warm and hot. Occasionally, the island would be battered by vicious winds and waves from tropical storms, but the walls of the castle protected the trees and the gardens.

            Inside of the castle, there were hundreds of rooms that had been turned into storerooms. There were rooms which held hardware supplies for building things, rooms with painting brushes, canvases and paint, a music room with all sorts of instruments from the lute to the electrical guitar and even more. Beneath the castle, there was a furnace that burned regularly, keeping the halls of the castle warm at night.

            The most amazing feature of the castle, however, was the library. There were books that were written far in the past and some even seemed to be from the future. There were also instructional books on building things, cooking, drawing, writing, math and many, many more. There might not have been much to explore on the island, but the materials in the castle were always enough for its sole inhabitant to keep busy all year around.

            There was a girl who lived in the castle. It wasn’t always just her who lived there. She once had an older brother who lived with her, but she couldn’t remember his name or his face anymore. When she tried to remember him, the only things she could recall were that he was incredibly smart and seemed to know everything and that he would always play with her when he wasn’t spending time in the laboratory downstairs. There were no pictures or drawings of him just as there were no pictures and drawings of her, but the girl was absolutely certain that she once had an older brother.

            She didn’t know who her parents were. She had never met them and her brother had never told her anything about them. Also, there were no pictures of them there either. It was just her on the island and since she no longer had anyone to play with, she spent her idle days in the library reading up on things and then trying them out with the supplies she had in the castle.

            The food in the storage rooms never seemed to go bad or if they did went bad at an extremely slow rate. There were no animals on the island, but there was plenty of fish in the ocean and crabs on the beach. It took her many tries, but she learned how to make a fishing pole and managed to catch a few fish although it took her all day. It took even more time, but she learned the right ways to prepare the fish and crabs and how to cook them properly. She had read that eating fish without cooking it properly was dangerous since they carried parasites.

            Trial and error was the ways she had fun and learned how to do things. Her brother had taught her the basics of most things and with her books she was also able to expand on that knowledge. However, there was always one thing that she wanted to know more about.

            It was people. Other than her brother, her only experience with people was inside her books. They seemed inconsistent. In some books, they were heroic and magnetic, able to turn their enemies into allies with charisma and bravery. In others, they were deeply flawed and troubled and did some bad things food good reasons. Even the ‘villains’ sometimes were portrayed more sympathetically than the ‘heroes.’

            Some stories were incredibly similar to each other, but the characters were expressed differently. Her brother had often said that books and other artwork were inspired by reality so the girl began to think that humans probably weren’t so different. Some books mused over the meaning of ‘humanity’ and what it really meant to be human. In her science books, they were explained in terms of evolution written by people called anthropologists. They were close cousins of chimpanzees and other apes and although they used to be other species of humans, they had all gone extinct.

            The girl was certain that she was human since she looked like them. She had a nose, teeth, ears and all the other necessary body parts of being a female of the species. Her hair was short and matched perfectly with a golden wheat field; her eyes were like cobalt gemstones.  She was definitely a human.

            However, in her novels, humans were more than just evolutionary animals. They represented something more. They were creatures capable of doing amazing things when they wanted to and possessed some kind of potential to be more than what they currently were. They were capable of great good and great evil, but the arc of history seemed to bend towards justice.

            What it meant to be ‘human’…even creatures like werewolves and vampires pondered over that philosophy. The girl wished deeply for her brother to return so she could ask him about what it meant to be human, but she couldn’t go search for him. Although there were atlases, none of them had any mention of where her island was. Surely, if she did have any clue where she lived, she could have made a calculation on the direction she had to go, but she had no idea where the island was.

            There was also no guarantee that she could fit enough food into any boat or raft she could build that would last an indefinite trip. That she could build a boat was more of a matter of time than skill, but food preservation, wind speed, water currents, those things involved something called ‘logistics’ and had to be planned very carefully.

            Also, if she made landfall, what would she do then? Would her brother be there waiting for her? Would anyone speak to her or help her? She couldn’t even remember her brother’s face, so how could she find him? No the only thing she could do was wait patiently for him to return in her castle while spending her time reading books she hadn’t read and practicing things over and over again until she could do it without looking at the manual.

 

            And then, one day, it happened.

 

            It started off with the most vivid dream she had ever had. She was standing in the middle of a street in a city. She recognized the look of the skyscrapers. To her right, there were people walking forward and to her left there were people walking towards her. They were shrouded in darkness, their features indistinguishable. It was almost as if she was standing on a stage with the spotlight only on her.

            Then she realized that there was someone standing in front of her who wasn’t in the dark. She thought it was her brother, at first, but it was a woman instead with her back turned. She was a brunette with dark shoulder length brown hair and was wearing some kind of uniform with a green vest and white pants. When she turned and looked at her with bright green eyes, the girl was certain that she had never seen this woman before. Never, not once, even in her dozens of books none of them looked like this lady.

There was something else too; she knew the woman’s name. She screamed it as though she had known the woman her whole life….and the dream came to an end.

            When the girl opened her eyes, the sun had already taken its place in the sky. She was back in her own bed inside the castle, but she knew immediately that she wasn’t alone anymore. Perhaps it was because she had grown so accustomed to being the only one on the island that she recognized the difference in its usual atmosphere. She immediately put on her dress and ran downstairs towards the entrance and found the doors to the castle wide open.

            There was a solitary figure standing with her back to her in the doorway, her hand raised to her ear. The girl instantly recognized the back of that brown hair and green vest.

            “No sir, there doesn’t appear to be…?”

            As if sensing the girl standing behind her, the figure turned around to look over her shoulder. Her vibrant light green eyes opened in shock and her mouth, in the middle of saying something, froze. In the silence that followed, the girl heard a noise from something the woman had in her ear.

            “A-Ah, yes sir, no, no everything’s fine…” she stammered as she spoke to some invisible person. “About that sir…there’s a little girl here.”

 

            That was the last day the girl spent in her castle.