The Girl Who Blinked

Weekly short story fiction, made up as I type. New drops each Wednesday.

The first time Amara teleported, she thought she had died or gone mad.

She was 12 years old at the time, fetching water at the construction site in the neighbourhood on a dull afternoon. Schools were on break and she was bored of house chores. She had already fetched four buckets by that point and had made sure to not open the tap all the way through so the bucket wouldn’t fill up too quickly. She needed to rest and her arms ached terribly.

Sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, knees up and eyes closed, she imagined a different type of day. A day where she was free to go visit Isoken and they could swap stories, or she could go to the beach like that one time Aunty Daisy had taken them, with the hot sands and wet waves creating a magical scene she never forgot. And the people; so many people it was an explosion of colour.

And that was when the wall she was leaning against disappeared, and the world fell away from her feet.

Amara almost drowned that day, 15 kilometres away from home near a small fishing village.

The terrified man in the canoe that fished her out of the ocean swore he saw a screaming child fall from the sky. It took her 6 hours and a few bus rides to find her way back home. By then the entire neighbourhood had turned itself inside out looking for her. There was a small crowd by her gate and policemen consoling her mother when she walked in.

It had taken 3 people to hold her mother back from pouncing on her and sending her straight to the gods.

That was the first time it happened. The second time had been even more weird.

By this time Amara was 21 and had managed to talk herself into remembering that incident as a kidnapping one being blocked out as trauma. Now in university, she spent most of her time studying or reading novels. Today was too hot to study and she didn’t have any new novels. Both her roommates were out – Tinuke was almost definitely at fellowship and Jane had gone to visit her boyfriend with the nice clothes and a lisp. She lay on the bed, no power in the hostel, eyes closed letting her mind wander. It was hot and she imagined a room with the AC going, cool, a soft bed where you couldn’t feel the springs and maybe a TV with a movie channel on. It sounded so cosy; like that guest house she and Lanre had –

Then the world dipped, and she got that sinking feeling in her stomach as the bed vanished. Then she felt the air fold in on where she had been, and explode in a wave as she arrived somewhere else, collapsing on the floor hard enough to drive the air from her lungs.

She heard a shrill scream as a half naked potbellied man and a light skinned woman looked at her in horror, hotel bedsheets pulled up to their chins with eyes as wide as plates.

Amara scrambled up, reaching the door in 2 strides and unlocking it without thinking. She could hear the man scrambling to get to the bathroom and the woman screaming the house down.

Amara exited the hotel at a full run and didn’t stop till she got to the school gate. Her lungs burned for a week.

She never mentioned the incidents to anyone. Not to her Mother, even when she was sick and the doctor called Amara aside to tell her she wouldn’t recover. Not to Lanre when he put the ring on her finger and told her there would never be secrets between them. She still didn’t mention it to him after she would put their baby daughter to sleep in her cot in the bedroom and have to retrieve her an hour later, still sleeping from the guest room she liked to crawl to go play.

Her husband was always amused he never heard the baby crawl out of the cot. Amara knew she never did.

She did finally tell Obi when she was 12, like she had been. Everyone said her daughter looked just like her, and took after her, and she always thought how ironic it was that they said that.

She called it The Blink, and tried her best to explain what had happened all those years ago and how she believed it worked. She didn’t tell her daughter that she had tried many times since then to do it, but the feeling was long gone.

She didn’t mention the loss. Or the regret.

Obi loved it. She learnt to focus it, harness it, embrace it. She tested the boundaries of it, documenting range and distance and velocity using apps and maps and things Amara didn’t understand to measure it. Amara loved that she and her daughter shared this secret, even though Obi wished she could tell her father what she had, but respected Amara’s wishes.

To tell her story was to tell her mother’s story. And that wasn’t hers to tell.

The day they saw Obi off to the airport to catch her flight to Canada, she tried not to cry as her daughter hugged her and kissed her, or as she watched her walk through immigration. She had grown up so fast, like in a dream where time is collapsible and eternity happens in seconds.

As she walked back to the car, she checked the note her daughter had pressed into her hand. It was a short note, but then the tears did come; messy and ugly. She pressed herself into her husband’s embrace and he consoled her, believing she wept for the child travelling to find a better life. But the words from the note echoed in her mind.

Life changes in the blink of an eye; so live for today, not for tomorrow; celebrate the love received, not sorrow.

And Amara cried, and smiled.