Prea and the Pea by Adam Parry
A beautiful and well-educated young woman is Prea; her family owned mines and slaves. Their servants were many and their larders well-stocked. Prea could be terribly selfish and hardly appreciated the luxury in which she lived.
One day after a rather epic tantrum she left her home, mother, father, the twins and all they had sacrificed for her and given her. She turned away from it all. In days her clothes were ragged, she was hungry, so hungry and her shoes were worn down with all the aimless walking she had done. Yet even though each footstep was a struggle leading her away from home she carried on.
Afraid now, not knowing what to do, but still with stubborn determination never return to those people and that house. She felt her will was weak and she knew deep down her parents would welcome her back but days followed days and she did not return. Prea lived in the wild and begged on the streets. Years followed years and she had gotten used to the hard life - homeless, marked with loneliness. So she did not return, and as the speeding years passed quicker, she had all but forgotten her childhood and the people in it, and at times she wondered if they had forgotten her too.
But one day, Prea, older, haggard and malnourished in the bitter cold came to a fancy folks houses and knocked on the door she had chosen to scrounge from.
Her Father opened the door. She did not recognise him and he showed no sign that he recognised Prea. But his heart went out to the woman who shivered at his door. He bade her enter and gave her bread more that she had eaten in a fortnight and the fine gentleman gave her a room to sleep in with a very soft and comfortable looking bed. At the sight of a real bed tiredness overcame Prea and she lay down thinking she’d be in the arms of Morpheus in no time. Yet she was both surprised and disgruntled that for a long, awful night she lay wide awake fidgeting from one side of the expansive bed to the other.
In the morning the gentleman asked how she slept.
Still tired she sullenly told him that she hadn’t slept a wink. Again the man fed her and, in the evening, offered the bedroom again to stay in if she wanted to and when she remembered her lonely desperate life with no nice people she accepted. She noticed a new mattress on top of the old...
Yet frustratingly each night and morning were the same and each morning the usual question, ‘Did you sleep?’
Grunt, stamp to the toilet, slam door and when she got back to her room yet another mattress was on her bed. For more than a year and a day, or maybe two or three, the bed was piled precariously with mattresses beneath her.
Finally there was one night when the mattresses were piled so high Prea’s nose almost touched the ceiling and yet again despite all the old man’s efforts she did not sleep, but, her nose on the ceiling sparked a Kaleidoscope of memories. (She had been like this, high up on her tower of plush and luxurious mattress and her heap of flattened pillows, many nights long ago, somewhere else, not in the prison of the world, but somewhere excellent where cobwebs tickled her nose and she had thought how silly life was.)
In the morning she climbed down and down and the old man greeted her in the hallway. Once again:
‘Did you sleep?’
But when she saw him this day she saw him as the little girl being tickled by a cobweb and she ran to him crying Father! And she held onto him for what seemed 'til tomorrow or the next day. When she released her clasp she stood back.
‘Where is Mother?’
He could not look at her.
‘She is gone. Dead a long time now,’ but he lifted his head and was surprised to see his daughter's pretty face beneath all the hard years tattooed on her old body.
‘And Matti? And Abigail?’
He sighed then shrugged. ‘They have big families of their own…’ then he looked her full square in the eyes ‘…why did you leave us?’
She had no answer.
Outside the warm, bed filled house, beyond it’s light, out where the wind blows, outside where the lost and the broken and the lame of mind slept and dreamt and dreamt, the snow fell.
