The Change Purse (standard:other, 891 words)
Author: MJ Dayton	Added: Apr 29 2009	Views/Reads: 3080/0	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Short Story Writing Contest Entry, April 2009 Topic must be touched upon only. Topic shown below Silly Scilla, silly Scilla," the young girl sang, as she pushed another tiny blue flower into her hair. She knew she would have to remove these

A mild westerly wind brushes tips of hyacinth and fills the early spring
air with their heavy fragrance.  Janie flits from plant to plant 
collecting their stems as she sways to her mother's soft humming.  Her 
mother works the soil, and Janie plays happily on the outskirts of the 
field, delighting in the caress of the breeze and the sun's warm kiss.  
She marvels at the beauty of the monarchs stopping briefly upon the 
flowers then lifting up and away.  Today she will be a butterfly too, 
with blue wings and emerald green spots that look like eyes. 

Arms spread wide, she dances around the flowers fanning them with her
wings.  A smile plays across her mother's lips as she watches her 
beautiful daughter so inspired by nature, and recalls days spent 
gardening with her own mother many years ago. 

Janie tires of being a butterfly and decides she should first be a
caterpillar, yellow and fuzzy, crawling through the flowers before 
earning her wings.  She drops to the ground and weaves her way between 
them, taking in their wonderful scent.  Her attention is caught by 
something glittering in the mid-day sun, and she discovers a tiny purse 
mostly buried in the dirt.  She pulls it out by its golden clasp, 
brushes off the dirt and examines its black vinyl covering.  Excitedly 
she opens it, hoping to find coins like she'd seen in her mother's 
change purse.  Slightly disappointed, she extracts its only contents, a 
small folded card. 

At nine years old, she has no trouble reading the 18th century
children's prayer she repeats nightly: “Now I lay me down to sleep,I 
pray the Lord my soul to keep;If I should die before I wake, I pray the 
Lord my soul to take” .  She flips the card over and sees strange 
characters she doesn't recognize.  Shrugging, she replaces the card, 
slips the purse into her pocket and skips off toward her mother.  No 
coins, but it's a treasure nonetheless.  She could be a pirate, 
collecting treasure from all over the world, but a pirate has to take 
to the seas, and she prefers to conduct her adventures at home in her 
field. 

Her mother has prepared the soil for the planting they will do together.
 They'll spend days sowing the field, tend to the care of their small 
crops and then the rewards will come in waves.  Janie likes the 
planting the best, and doesn't want to know what type of seed she is 
dropping.  Like Janie herself, the seeds can become anything.  Perhaps 
one day they'll grow a plant that sprouts crystals or berries the size 
of baseballs. Each seed is a possibility, a surprise waiting for 
Janie's discovery. 

The air becomes crisp as the sun dips down to rest.  Mother and daughter
return to the warmth of their small home, perfectly sized for the two 
of them.  Janie finds a vase in the cupboard and fills it with the 
hyacinth she picked in the field.  She sets the table with the flowers 
as a centerpiece.  She inhales their sweet fragrance deeply and, with 
eyes closed, she is the butterfly again, sipping on their sweet nectar. 


After a simple meal, her mother retires to an easy chair with a book and
Janie wanders off to her room with the music from her mother's radio 
trailing along.  She has an hour before bedtime and should work on her 
Social Studies project.  But she is drawn her window, where twilight 
casts a lavender blanket upon her field and it beckons to her with a 
lover's call.   She could be a night bird, on the lookout for early 
berries.  She pulls a dark hoodie over her head and slips out the back 
door. 

She is found several hours later, at the northern tip of the field.  Her
small body is swollen and red from repeated stings.  The cause of death 
is later listed as anaphylaxis resulting from yellow-jacket stings, and 
death came quickly.  The hole in her grieving mother's heart will never 
heal, part of her dies with the loss of her only child. 

The small black purse was not found with her body, nor anywhere near it.
 A lone figure had picked it up, opened it and replaced the card 
carrying Janie's name written in an ancient script with a similar card 
containing another name in the same script.  He slipped it inside his 
cloak, and faded from this existance.  His work was done, the change 
was made.  Four hundred miles northwest, a cry broke out. 

In a brightly lit room in a hospital outside of Detroit,  Max Robert
McLaughlin was displeased with his change of environment.  The light 
and cold assaulted his senses and the handling was rough.  Within a 
short time though, he was washed, swaddled and placed next to his 
mother's breast to nurse.  As he began to suckle, his picked up the 
scent of her hyacinth perfume.  It was immediately comforting and a 
smell he would enjoy throughout his long, upcoming life.  The smell of 
hyacinth and open fields would rank among his favorite things.  He'd 
have a sense of adventure and an ingrained fear of bees.  And when he'd 
find the small black purse, eighty-two years from now  in the corner of 
a grocer's parking lot, his loves and fears would no longer be his own. 



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