Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,3

home expecting to hear my mother’s screams ring out or sirens to fill the streets, but it was so quiet, you could hear the leaves in the trees fluttering.

I expected to find my body lying on the floor in the family room, though when I flew around the side of our house and stopped at the glass doors, I saw I was wrong.

My parents weren’t trying to revive my corpse, because there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with me. My body was sitting up straight, my head bowed over my diary. There was a pen in my right hand.

The sliding door was closed, but I could still hear my mother’s voice.

“Exodus twenty,” she read from the Bible in her lap. “Then God spoke all these words, saying: I am the Lord your God.”

The Jenny I used to be took dictation, slowly writing in the journal as my parents watched. Now I noticed there was something wrong with me, but nothing my parents could detect.

My flesh was empty. More graceful than a robot from a horror movie, but still horrible.

CHAPTER 2

Jenny

MY BODY LOOKED HEAVIER TO ME, like a statue of a girl. Maybe my spirit was what gave my flesh and bones their lightness. Since I didn’t have any control over my body anymore, it was sickening to watch it move on its own. My hand held the pen, my elbow and shoulder shifted back and forth as I actually wrote in the journal, my eyelids blinked, my head tilted slightly. The worst part was the way my mother and father seemed to have no idea.

Finally my father took the journal from my hands. My back bent forward, feet shifted, as I knelt in the middle of the Prayer Corner. My fingers interlaced, ready for praying, and my parents laid hands on my strange doll head. Why didn’t they feel my absence like a chill under their palms? All those things that made me who I was since I was born didn’t matter to my parents. I sat outside the glass doors and cried like a baby.

I knew I couldn’t take my body with me and I knew I couldn’t stay, so without saying goodbye, I abandoned my life. My spirit slid up the wall of my house, rising as slowly as a raindrop in reverse, and glided over the white rocks on our roof. I could see every rotting leaf there as I swam the air over my home and then up high into our neighbor’s tree. Like Wendy from Peter Pan, I flew through the branches, beyond the leaves, and into the sky.

Was anything possible now? Paris or the pyramids in Egypt? Could I sit on the shoulder of the Statue of Liberty if I wanted? All I knew for sure was that I wanted the opposite of my old life.

My wish was granted—I was there in a single heartbeat.

The painting was huge, three feet wide and six feet high. A girl, probably life size, rode on the back of some half-hidden sea serpent in the middle of an aqua lake. She stood up straight between the monster’s fanlike fins and held a glass bowl in her hands. Calmly, as if this kind of thing were totally normal, she poured the water from the bowl into the face of the creature. Her gown was dark blue and fell off one of her white shoulders. Her hair was gypsy black.

But I wasn’t like her. Even though it seemed as if no one could see me or hurt me, I was still scared.

A plaque beside the enormous frame said it had been painted by a man named Waterhouse, on loan from Australia. I was in a wing of the county art museum. I’d been there only once, on a school field trip that my parents let me attend because they had been assured there would be no nude statues and because there was an exhibit of artifacts from the Holy Land on display.

But today the walls were full of skin—pale bodies and rich colors. I was surrounded by Pre-Raphaelite paintings from all over the world. A maiden leaned over a balcony to kiss an armored knight, a lady with waves of auburn hair breathed in the scent of a flower in her hand, mermaids lounged around on rocks, water nymphs hid between lily pads and tried to pull a shepherd into their pool. Something my mother would have considered borderline pornography.

I stayed there for I don’t know how long before