Jessica's Box of Dreams

            Jessica lived her childhood years at the St. Andrews Orphanage on Prince Edward Island, Canada.  She lived a life of hardships, always pondering the question of what it would be like to live a normal life.  During her free time outside, she spent hours exploring the land around the orphanage.  She would pretend the land belonged to her, and that everything she saw, smelled, and touched was her property. 

            It was on a day like this, during her free time, that she roamed further than she had ever gone before.  She lost track of how long she was walking away from the orphanage.  Jessica skipped through the woods, and out into a field of tall yellow grass.  The top of the grass came up to her hips.  She held her arms out a little ways and let the hairs on the grass tickle her palms.  The ocean was in view once she walked over the first knoll.  She stood half frozen, half alive with the passion of being out away from the orphanage that confined her. 

            She nearly ran down to the white sandy beach.  Her blonde hair was flowing behind her, like the tail on a racehorse does when it is running as fast as it can around a track.  Her blue checkered dress, homely and worn, tried to keep up with her hair.  She crashed intentionally onto the sand, rolling and absorbing the smell of the salt water the sand and sea wind held.  Her old black shoes she kicked off with ease, they never fit well anyway, probably worn by a dozen different girls she thought.  She looked up at the blue sky, the few puffy clouds gave her a sense of freedom, she didn’t know why.  She chose a cloud at random and pretended she could ride it.  She closed her eyes and felt alive with pleasure.  Her hands dug into the sand, her mind was telling her she needed a firm handhold in order to ride the cloud.

            Her fingers found something, hard and not belonging in the sand.  The oddity brought her back down to earth.  She rolled over on her side as her curious mind forced her hands to unearth whatever it was that brought her out of her flight.  As she unearthed a small portion of a hard green surface, she bounced to her knees and dug more frantically.  Finally, when she had uncovered the two foot by one foot surface of the green object, did she know what it was.  It was the top of a chest or box of some kind.  She cleared the perimeter of the object, her blue and white dress becoming stained with the dark colors of wet sand.  She was able to pull the box out of the sand, to her surprise it was lighter than the size of the box suggested. 

            Jessica examined the box more closely once it was out of the ground.  The dark green exterior was tainted with brown and black streaks from years of being in the ground.  The chest had a small black knob on the front.  Without hesitation, Jessica tried turning the lock counter-clockwise.  It did not move.  She tried the other way, and still nothing.  Again she went back to the direction she tried first, and this time she got a little movement.  She tried again and again, each time her mind was racing with hallucinations of pirate treasure, and each time the knob moved a little more.

 CLICK, the latch finally sounded.  Jessica took a moment to consider the possibilities, but only briefly, this wasn’t the first time her curiosity prevailed against patience.  She opened the lid slowly, wanting to remember this moment always.  Inside the box, wrapped in black layers, was a clear globe.  Something Jessica thought resembled what a gypsy woman would tell a person’s fortune with. 

            Jessica picked up the globe, when she did so; a piece of paper fell from the bottom of the globe, back into the chest.  As she held the globe in one hand, she picked up the small piece of paper with the other.  She read aloud what was written on the paper, “Whosoever finds this will have their dreams lived in full.”

            She dropped the paper, and held on to the globe with both hands and looked deep into its core.  She began to wonder what trick she needed to perform in order to activate the device.  As she was looking into the globe a small light began to flicker in its center.  She looked harder and deeper into the globe.  Her head swam with a slight dizziness; her body felt as if it were floating.  She closed her eyes to try and regain her senses, when she opened them again she was on the cloud she was thinking about moments before.  The world passed by below her, she was miles away from the troubles of life. 

            When she returned to the orphanage late that night to scolding’s and discipline by her superiors, she didn’t worry.  She had only come back to pack her few possessions, tomorrow was the day her dreams were going to start becoming reality.