The white-haired girl

It was all about the girl, the child with the white hair, not blond, not even remotely blond but really white. Her hair matched her very pale skin and her light blue eyes. The was something strange about this girl. She was born from an egg, like a bird. I don’t know how we knew, because she never told us. She didn’t tell us anything, she had ways to make us know things.

On this cold and frosty morning, she called us to her house, although she didn’t really call and we didn’t know her. Maybe she summoned us, I don’t know. We just felt we had to get up early, it was still dark. We had a strong urge to get out, out of bed and out of our comfortable house. We just walked on, hardly speaking, not even looking at each other. The pale winter sunlight was trying to break the darkness when we saw the house, long shadows of the bare branches belonging to the surrounding trees reaching out to us like hands.

It was a big wooden house, wooden floors and a fireplace in every room. The girl's guardian welcomed us in like she was expecting us. We were sure she wasn’t the girl’s mother, she seemed to be old with dark piercing eyes looking at us from a wrinkled face. She made me feel uneasy and unwilling to talk to her. I didn’t trust her, but we followed her around the house and into the room with the white-haired girl, where she left us alone.

The girl was sitting in the middle of the room, on the wooden floor, opposite the fireplace. The room was empty apart from a pile of blocks. She was carefully putting one block on another, although she was really too old for this game. It was a strange contrast, this bleak child, dressed in a simple off white dress, with her snow-white hair and big pale blue eyes, playing with the colourful blocks. We tried to talk to her, but she put her finger on her lips and urged us to go on to the next room.

There was a big white egg in this room, it’s scale broken and partly lying next to the egg, which was still in shape. The broken scale was like a window in the egg, allowing is to look inside. Carefully we tiptoed to the egg, afraid to touch it. When we looked in, we saw a woman giving birth, not to a baby, but to a full-grown girl, a white-haired girl who looked too old to play with blocks. What kind of place was this? We tried to get back to the room with the other girl, but all we could do was go on until we reached the front door. We heard the footsteps of the guardian coming towards us and didn’t want to wait.

While we ran from the house, fully enlighted by the sun by now, I looked back. Behind one of the windows appeared a face, a girl with very blue eyes like two beams of light in a pale face, surrounded by white hair, real white, not blond. I hesitated, wanted to go back, but my mate took my hand and dragged me from the scene. I was never able to find that house again.