The Healing Stone
Selia opened her eyes. Her room surrounded her, as usual, all greens and golds and yellows. But then she thought that something was off. Selia rose slowly and put on her tunic, then checked the calendar. When she tore off the previous date to reveal the date, she gasped.
“Midsummer’s Eve!”
Selia and Katalia, Selia’s friend and fellow student, were to go to the woods that day to witness the Ceremony of Ghosts, which had been performed for generations upon generations, to call upon and pray to their ancestors. In this most important of rituals, only priestesses and their apprentices were aloud to attend.
“Selia! Breakfast is ready!”
The call kicked Selia out of her reverie, and she sped to a gallop to the kitchen.
“ Don’t gallop inside the house! I can’t count how many times I’ve said that and you still don’t listen!”
“Mother, I was just trying not to miss breakfast!”
“No matter! Your punishment will be to clean out the pigsty.”
“You know I have the Ceremony to go to!”
“Well then, you’d better get cleaning.”
Selia mumbled, “No fair, Katalia never has to clean out her pigsty,” but only so her mother couldn’t hear. Selia knew very well that Katalia couldn’t, because she didn’t have one. When she realized what she had just said, she tried not to giggle.
To avoid further questions, Selia rushed out of the house, making a clopping noise. She quickly mucked the pen and put down fresh hay, replacing the pigs, and then feeding them. She knew she wouldn’t have very much time left for eating, and had taken a cheese sandwich with her. As she galloped to the village center, she noticed the woods and decided to take a detour through there.
The woods were silent as the wolves during a solar eclipse. As Selia galloped through them, she spotted a glitter, and stopped. The glitter turned out to be a stone, and quite a pretty one at that. She turned it over in her hand, wondering. The Priestesses were supposed to have removed all of the stones from the woods that morning, to use for the Ceremony.
She heard a rustle and her torso spun around.
“Katalia! You scared me!” Selia cried accusatively.
“Well, at least I didn’t sneak up on you and say ‘BOO!’”
Selia sighed. She knew this was a hopeless attempt at making Katalia slightly more civil. Then came the sound of hooves, coming from the west.
“Don’t be late! Get to the East, both of you! The Ceremony’s about to start!”
Both of them nearly kicked in surprise. It was the Mistress Thel, head of the village. She had short black hair that was graying slightly, with olive toned skin and a palomino body.
“Oh!” Katalia and Selia both cried in unison.
As they walked through the woods, the sun began creeping westward, and they sped to a gallop to get to the Ceremony on time.
The Ceremony was like a dream. The sun had set, and there were torches all around the clearing, creating an eerie light. Mistress Thell walked slowly toward the center of the clearing with a bag of sage and eucalyptus, to summon all of the non-flesh-eating ghosts in the area, and poured it over the ceremonial fire.
The effect was a column of black smoke, rising up to about Selia’s chest, and then disappearing. The smoke was quickly replaced by a swirling fume that smelled like sea salt. An ear-splitting shriek filled the clearing, and then all went black and utterly silent. It was like a cloth was being pressed against Selia’s eyes and ears, lifted and then, with a small swirl of smoke, the ghosts appeared.
They were like the faint images left in your retina after looking at the sun for too long, only more solid. One of them came up to Selia, and whispered in the echo of a voice,
“You are the one.”
When Selia had regained her bearings, the ghosts had disappeared and the centaurs in the clearing were just recovering.
“Now I know why the priestesses don’t look forward to the Ceremony all that much.” Katalia whispered in her ear. Selia giggled. As the party of ceremony-goers proceeded to the village, yet another centaur galloped into the woods.
“Mistress Keltar is ill!” the messenger gasped.
Selia simply stood there and gaped. Mistress Keltar was her mother, and she had seen her, healthy as, well, a horse.
Soon everyone in the village was infected with the strange sickness, including Mistress Thel. Selia decided to figure out what was doing this, once and for all. It didn’t go quite as well as expected, because everyone who Selia met wanted her to go away, or weren’t really sick. Then, when she took with her the stone she had found on the day of the day of the ceremony, it all changed.
Selia went down the path at a brisk trot. “This should be it,” she mumbled to herself wearily. She knocked on the door.
“Hello? Oh, it’s you. Come in.”
The woman who spoke was lying in a straw bed, with her tail swishing somewhat with anticipation. Selia took off her bag of supplies and put it on the windowsill, so that her stone glimmered in the summer sunlight.
“Could I see that stone? It’s very pretty.”
“Yes, of course. Here,” Selia passed her the stone.
Suddenly the woman twitched. Then a stream of black came flying from where her heart was. The woman was knocked out cold, and Selia went to check her breathing, pulse, and temperature. Amazingly enough, her heart was back to normal, her lungs were clear of fluid, and her forehead was no longer burning with the heat of fever.
Selia gave the stone to many others who were diseased, and the scene repeated itself every time. Selia was then known for the rest of her life and perhaps longer, as the healer who cured the Great Disease.
wasn’t that excited at first. I already had a poetry set to use on the fridge, and the words it came with, (happy, ball, play, cake) weren’t really what I wanted to write about. But these words were stronger, and I found myself playing around with them in different ways. Here’s what I came up with:
There isn’t a perfect rhythm, but for a fridge poem, that’s okay. I went back and changed the way the words were on the page, but I didn’t change any words. The result is a poem that is sort of raw, and rocky. It’s a really good writing exercise, and it’s fun to write. 
This story is a character sketch written by “Rosa”, my six year old friend with a great imagination! “Rosa’s Rosy Life” is a story about an imaginary character that she based on herself. 
