Elements

1

This story is based on a dream I recently had.
It was just so good, I had to document it.
*I don't own the cover image

Raye slid a pan of hot buns out of the oven and onto the counter, the warm scent enveloping her. Humming a tune, she looked up to find no customers in the bakery she helped in.

Raye's shoulders drooped and she sighed. "Oh, well."

After arranging the buns in the window, she locked the door to begin cleanup for the day.

She had just started sweeping when an older woman came in.

"Raye, I told you not to lock the door when I coming!" The older woman's words had a twinge of the accent Raye still couldn't place.

"I'm sorry, Olena. I thought you were still visiting your daughter." Raye set the broom down. "I didn't want anyone to come in and steal the buns while I was sweeping."

Olena sniffed and flapped her hands, shooing Raye out the door. "Go, go! Let me do the work. Go home." The door banged shut behind Raye.

She sighed. She knew the old woman meant well, but every time Olena said "go home"....

Raye didn't actually have a home to go to. She had grown up wandering around this small farming island, helping the residents with various chores to earn a living. While most times the people she helped out let her stay with them, this time Olena had no place for her to stay.

To be honest, Raye would have rather stayed in her boat than with the old woman anyway.

She rounded the corner, ducking her head to avoid the limb she always hit her head on.

There, laying on the sand, was her boat.

It was a simple design, a canoe big enough for fourteen men and cargo. The two floats attached to the main body helped to keep the boat afloat through rough water.

The inside of the main canoe was as neat as Raye could keep it, with her clothes in a watertight wooden crate and her medical supplies in another, with blankets in the bottom.

When she was young, she was always getting into trouble and coming to the farm she worked at bruised and scraped. The farmer's daughter took her in and taught her how to find plants that would help her ails and make serums from them. To this day, Raye still had some of the original herb concoctions Miss Evly had given her.

Raye stopped at the boat only to toss her flour-covered apron over a rope, then turned and headed for the rocky path leading away from the water's edge.

Raye had heard the locals talking about the blowhole, that it was the access to the Cave Of No Time. The cave had never been found, though many had tried.

The locals had also said that the water that occasionally spouted from the hole in the rock was the water energies searching for their kind, trying to bring them back home.

Raye could care less about why the rocky cliff spouted water from its one hole. All she knew was that it was a good place to come and think.

She sighed, gathering her skirt under her as she crouched down. The sea ebbed forward and backward, exposing newly smoothed sand every time.

"Where is my family?" Raye whispered, letting the ocean breeze whisk the words away.