Evah lived in fear. She lived with worry. It was not the fear you feel when you think something will be served for dinner that you don’t like. It was not the worry that your shoes may come untied when you played Thack Ball at school. For Evah, it was not even the fear of Pearly Shyen, who pushed her around and called her a nobody from nowhere because her skin was a different color and her hair would never grow straight and long below her shoulders. No, the problem was none of that. Evah worried over things she imagined. But it was worse. She worried over things she imagined that then became real. Once there was an eight-eyed monster with five arms and tongues flipping about from every palm. There was sometimes a deep dark hole beneath the flinging bars where she swung and dangled at school. The hole went on forever, and fire flashed out of it like a hungry beast smacking its lips in anticipation of a sumptuous meal. But these were only things Evah thought up as she played to make her fun more adventurous or something she thought of sometimes when she was in her room at night and didn’t really want to go to sleep.

She realized what other children could only imagine, for her could become very real. Now, others were beginning to see the workings of her imagination too. It was a dark fiery hole beneath the flinging bars, as mentioned here, that caused the children to stop playing with her. One day, while Corvy Bane, was swinging on the bars with Evah, he saw that deep dark hole, and it made him cry. He ran away and, being afraid to tell anyone the extraordinary sight he saw, Corvy lied to the teacher, and the other children, saying Evah pinched him hard and started to smell like a rhino’s but. He was not very nice, and afterwards, neither were the other children. On top of that, the news that a boy thought Evah smelled like a rhino’s but just gave Pearly one more reason to be mean.

To imply that Evah smelled like a rhino’s but couldn’t have been farther from the truth. You see, her happiest time was tending to the flowers in the garden with Father Segura. Her favorite flower was the glillin. It smelled sweet and fresh, and as it was her strange and unknown gift to make things real out of nowhere, she manifested the scent of the glillin flower where ever she went. That was the real reason Corvy wanted to play with her, and the real reason Pearly Shyen hated her so much. She was jealous. Both, because she wished she smelled so good, and because she had a secret crush on Corvy.

Evah was different, and it made her feel alone. She didn’t understand the wonders she could make happen, or why Corvy Bane could see that deep dark hole to nowhere. No one had ever witnessed the things from her mind. Not that she knew of anyway. What she convinced herself of was that she could never let it happen again, because it could only lead to sorrow and more isolation. So she lived a lonely life. As you may know, the fear of not being liked does only one thing really well. It keeps you from making new friends. It can make you run away from friends you’ve known for a long time. It is in this way that loneliness only makes more loneliness, and then more, and more, until you feel like you don’t even have a reason to live. 

Now, you may think all of these things going on in a person’s life would be more than enough to have great cause for fear and worry, but even all this was not the most profound source of Evah’s troubles. She hid herself away from the other children. The time she spent with Father Segura in the garden became empty of the joy it once brought. She stared deeply. She sometimes seemed confused. Once, walking up the steps to her classroom, she lifted her foot high, as if not to harm some pretty bug, then tripped, and made her knee bleed on the concrete. You can bet that Pearly Shyen had some laughs that day. Then, Evah seemed to hear someone calling her, too. Playing on the flinging bars, she stopped suddenly, hopped off into the grass and stared at the vacant space of the field before her. I was becoming concerned.

I guess I should introduce myself. Now is as good a time as any. My name is Felin, and I’m a rat. A church rat as a matter of fact. A big fat black church rat in one of the last two churches of its kind in the entire Spirean system, and it’s a strange fate that’s brought me here. How many rats do you know of, after all, who tell stories and watch over children? My life has its challenges too. To say the least, people don’t like church rats. It’s not like having a little church mouse around; peeping sweetly, being soft and white and barely making a ruckus. I clomp around loudly pretty much everywhere I go. My teeth dangle weirdly from my mouth. My fur is thick and course. It’s hard not to notice me in a quiet church; padding and pounding with a smack smack smack of my feet. My tail is absurdly big, and it flops and bonks on every hard surface, from the stone tiles on the floor to the highest beams of the arches above the pews. That’s where I live; fifteen-feet in the air and twenty-feet from the view of the chorus balcony. I have a puzzling secret of my own. One that even I can’t understand. I’m more than just a rat. I know Evah. I’ve known her longer than only one life could allow.