There was once a baby girl, who clung to her mother and father. She lived in the village of Seiwah, in a small hut with her family and her grandparents. They did not have much, but they had enough, and they had much joy, being together and sharing in each other’s company. The baby did not know grief or suffering, and only knew joy and love. 

But one day, tragedy struck. The parents and grandparents of the baby grew sick with a plague that swept through the village. And they died, leaving the baby all alone to cry and cry in the nighttime. The baby did not know where her family had gone, or why they had left her all alone. She was very alone and very miserable indeed. 

The neighbouring family heard the baby crying and crying, and they went to investigate what was wrong. This family had a magic stone which could ward away illnesses, which was why they were protected from the plague that had swept through the village. They saw that the baby was all alone, and that her family was dead. They decided to take the baby in to raise her, so that she didn’t die all by herself. 

For they thought they were becoming great people by helping this poor orphan that had nowhere to go. They thought they were becoming very great, becoming very honourable, becoming very worthy of exaltation. And they took in this child to increase their own honour, and not to help the child. 

But their strange sense of morality did help the little girl, whom they named Dayana. They raised her as their own, and they showed her care and appreciation. The child was very grateful to her adoptive family, and she was very grateful of what she had in her life, despite having suffered such great loss, loss which coloured her whole world no matter how many years had passed. 

Dayana was the youngest child in the house. The family had two older children, two biological children. A girl and a boy named Yara and Malk. They were not unkind to her, and the three of them spent much time together playing and getting into trouble around the village. 

But everything changed when Dayana was ten. The village was hit by a famine. And it was a terrible famine indeed, with many people going hungry. There was misery and heartache all around. And Dayana grieved for the people in her village. 

Now, her adoptive family was not hit hard by the famine. They were the most prosperous family in the village, and everyone looked up to them, at least seemingly. They had a large tract of land, and many workers to work it, so they still had enough wealth to keep themselves fed. To keep themselves fed, that is. 

But they told Dayana that times were tough and they were running out of resources. They didn’t have enough to give everyone food, and they had to give food to their own people first. They had to give food to the actual, true members of their family first. Of course, they would still feed her, but it would be the leftovers that would be left after the family had eaten first. 

Dayana was heartbroken, she felt incredibly betrayed. She came to realize that she wasn’t really a part of the family, she wasn’t really considered part of the family. She was less important, less cherished, and less considered. She was considered second to the biological children of the family. 

She was hungry. She was hungry but more importantly, more devastatingly, she was alienated. She was alone. She was in her house, the place she had learned to think of as home, the place where she grew up and spent her days, but she was not a part of it. She was not as much a part of it, as deeply a part of it, as the others were. She was an outsider in her own home. 

And her own mother and father, her own sister and brother, they had cast her out. They had kept her in, they had kept her with them, and tied to them, but they had cast her out. And this cut deeper into her than any hunger could. She knew she wasn’t seen as an equal here, she wasn’t seen as a full person here, just as deserving of all good things as any other person. And she had no home. 

But at the same time, there was nowhere else that she could go. This was the only home she had known. This was the only home she had ever been in, the only people who had ever been her’s. That she could remember. Of course, she knew about her true family, she missed them dearly in every breath she took, but she could not remember them. 

Once deep at night Dayana was taking a walk through the village. She was hungry, but that was nothing new. She was all by herself, but the moon was with her. The moon was with her and the stars were with her and the darkness was with her. And she felt as though she was seen by the darkness, she felt as though she was seen by the night. 

In an instant, before her eyes there was a strange woman. She was the colour of fire, red and orange and yellow, and it seemed as though flames were dancing across her entire body. She shone in the darkness, and being near her warmed the young child. 

“Who are you?” she asked, surprised. 

“I’m Leela, the fairy of this village,” the woman replied. 

“A fairy?” the child asked. “I didn’t know fairies were real.” All things considered, she wasn’t nearly as surprised by all of this as she should be. She was a little girl, after all, and still believed in magical things. She was more amazed than anything. Amazed and hopeful. 

“Well, there are more things that are real than the humans believe there are, there are many things beyond human knowledge and reason.”

“I understand. It’s good to meet you, Leela. But why are you here?”

“I have come to give you a gift, young one.”

“Why me? I’m not special.”

“You are more than you believe you are, sweet child.” 

The fairy gave the little girl a large bag, larger than her in size. Dayana did not know where Leela had gotten it from. It was very light, but when the child opened the bag she saw that it was filled to the brim with the most plump, juicy, delectable-looking fruits she had ever seen. There were fruits of all types, all shapes, all colours. There were berries and apples and oranges and kiwis and pears and plums and dragonfruit and coconuts and guavas and avocados and peaches and olives and the list went on. 

“Wow, thanks!” The girl exclaimed, turning her head up from the bag, up to the direction of Leela. But she saw that the fairy was gone, only leaving warmth in her wake. Dayana stepped into the warmth for a moment, letting it warm her. She felt as though she was being held. She felt as though she was being held by a mother. 

She knew what she had to do next. She walked to the huts of everyone in the village. The workers and peasants, the shepherds and dairy maids and bamboo cutters. The tailors and the bakers and the weavers and the cobblers. All the houses, all the people, all the families got a fresh bunch of fruits to eat. 

Before the night was over, the little girl slipped back into her bedroom and hid the bag beneath her pillow. There was one last apple left from the bounty within the bag, and she ate that. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough. But she felt more satisfied than she had ever felt in her life, a life which seemed to her incredibly long. 

The next day, no-one talked about the magical fruits. It was as if they had never been distributed in the first place. But, as Dayana walked through the village, she saw that there were many fruit peels and pits and seeds and shells in the compost baskets of the people. And she smiled to herself. She knew it was better if the village people didn’t talk about it. She knew it was better if her family didn’t find out through overheard talk. 

The next night, she was sad. This beautiful - beautifully rebellious, that is - day had come to an end. She took the bag that Leela had given her out from under her pillow, just to remember that magical night. 

But when she looked into the bag, she saw that it was once again full! 

She climbed out of her bedroom window and once again went to every hut in the village, distributing her bounty of nutritious, filling, energy-rich food. She did this for night after night after night, single-handedly ameliorating the famine that had come to her village. She only had one fruit left for herself at the end of each night. But she was satisfied anyways. 

But one day, eventually, a problem arose. 

See, Dayana’s adopted mother and father had been noticing that she was sleeping a lot during the day, and they wanted to know why that was. They tried asking Dayana about it, but all she said was that she was more tired than usual these days. Her parents accepted this at first, but eventually they got suspicious. 

Her foster mother decided to hide in a bush outside Dayana’s bedroom to see what she was up to in the nighttime. From there, she saw the little girl climb out her bedroom and then pull out a giant bag. She saw the child go towards the direction of the other homes in the village. But before she could get on the path, the foster mother stopped her. 

“Where do you think you’re going?! And what do you have in that?!” she harshly demanded. The child startled and looked up at her with fear in her big, dark eyes. 

“Nothing!” she asservated, “they’re just rocks that I got from the river. I am putting them back now. Don’t worry.” 

“Don’t think you can fool me with that lie! Let me see what’s in there!” The mother yelled at the child and forced her to show her what was in the bag. When she saw  the fruits, so ripe and delicious-looking in the glow of the moon, she became infuriated. 

She held Dayana by the wrist and dragged her back into the house, waking up the other members of the family. 

The family all prowled around Dayana and they demanded to know why Dayana had given such good, lush fruits to the people in the village and not to them, her own family. The shouted that all good and delicious things were meant to be shared, and that they, too, had just as much of a right as everyone else to eat these delicious fruits. 

Dayana stood there, still and silent. She did not allow herself to cry. She did not allow herself to feel fear. She said nothing as they screamed and shouted at her, voices full of hatred and pride. She said nothing as they questioned her again and again and again. She forced back tears and she stood as resolute as a monument. 

Eventually, the family, her family, her not-family, they reached into her bag and pulled out the fruit. Each member ate one. And then, hungrily, they each ate another. And another, and another, until the fruits that were meant for the poor and hungry people of the village were all gone. 

The family started bickering after this. Instead of going to sleep, they started getting into arguments about the most trivial things. Throughout the course of the night, the argument just got louder and louder, got more and more heated, until there broke out amongst Dayana’s four foster family members a fight. 

They fought each other, pushing and punching and kicking and slapping and clawing and biting and slamming each other’s heads into the walls and the floors. The fight got more and more violent, and more and more brutal, until at last each member of the family had been killed in the brutality. They had all killed each other, and had left Dayana standing there looking at the commotion in horror. 

The child was afraid. She was deeply afraid. But she also felt within herself a sense of sky-blue joy, a sense of bright victory, and a sense of dark and smouldering restitution. She went to gather the special stone the family had that protected them from plagues. And she gathered her magical bag. And she left that home full of dead bodies, never to return. 

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