25. Zaels (Part 1)

“Looks deceive,” Papa Kyra whispered into his darling’s tender ear. “What color is this shell Kyra?”

“Just plain old white Papa,” Kyra muttered rolling her eyes while biting her lower lip, a sign Papa knew was her way of saying hurry up and say what you got to say.

Holding the “just plain old white shell” in his tanned and leathery hands, Papa raised it up to the sun and ever so slowly begin to rotate the pearl-like hull until a single ray of sunshine revealed a dazzling display of kaleidoscopic color and intricate detail that could only be seen from the right perspective. Kyra giggled with delight as Papa once again tickled her brain in ways that would forever change how she saw the outside world. How she saw life from the inside would have to wait a few more years.

Kyra laid in bed, memories of Papa, the beach and those many lessons dancing in her mind’s eye as vividly as if they had happened yesterday. As Kyra grew older, her Papa’s language became a little more colorful. She was never sure if this was his attempt to relate to a teenage girl, or if he just felt comfortable enough to treat her like one of the boys. Really didn’t matter, because for her, Papa hung the many moons that graced the nighttime skies over Valla cove. She still felt that way today.

“The unskilled mind cavorts with that slut of a sense called sight. The two together romp with boisterous raucousness, caring not the havoc and pain they leave in their wake,” Papa would say with a sly smile and twinkle in his eye, knowing the words he had chosen would indelibly stick in her mind like red passion fruit juice on a new white blouse. Somehow, she had the sense Papa had ruined many a young lasses’ white blouses with a bit of passion fruit juice. The old man still had it; he still had that spark of wonder in life and in his step. His mind was as bright as she imagined it had ever been.

“Opinions form and hearts harden without direct communication,” his words rolling off the scars of his own heart. “The enemy, Kyra, is not sight, not something out there; the enemy is thought untethered from awareness, a stranger to wisdom and a destroyer of relationships. Trust not the eye alone Kyra.” That one phrase she could have tattooed to her forehead. It might have saved her from hearing the story of the Zael’s just a few less times. (to be continued)