Quick Tale: Fairydust

My best friend was moving houses, moving countries, moving continents.
 She announced it on the day before her departure, declaring that she will never see me again. We were lying beneath the tree in my garden, an occasional raindrop from yesterday’s rain plinking down on us. Her braided hair smelled of jasmine, and the water drops reflected millions of starbursts onto her skin.
“I’m moving,” she said. “, Away. Across the world.”
“Where?” I asked, devastated.
“Away.”
“But you’ll call?”
“There are no phones.”
 “E-mail?”
“There are no computers.”
“Where is this place?”
Her lips thinned. “Where there’s no steel. Now, do you want to play one last game or what?”
We played till her mother came to call her home. Her mother’s eyes seemed strange in the twilight, an almost purple blaze. Fairy eyes, I thought, vaguely.
She turned at the edge of the street and waved at me, and that was the last I ever saw of her. I had the bottle pressed into my hand, the bottle that she gave me, my keepsake.
The bottle of silver fairy-dust.
Through years the bottle has solaced me when I needed it the most. The warmth of her hand has never faded from it. The silver powder in it shines sometimes, an invitation to uncork it, and when I open it, there’s the scent of faint jasmine. The shimmer of starbursts. The scent of earth freshly watered. The sound of two girls and their beating hearts and the rustle of wind as it pulls time along with it in an eternal race. The sound of two souls still not stained with the bittersweet spice of separation.
I think of it as a slice of time, a tiny pie-wedge of it, powdered and enclosed in a bottle.
Fairy-dust, from a fairy-girl.