Information
Pixy the Pixlin
Prim
Legacy Name: Prim
The
Angelic TelenineOwner:
KRONOSAge: 16 years, 10 months, 2 weeks
Born: June 6th, 2007
Adopted: 8 years, 4 months ago
Adopted: December 24th, 2015
Statistics
- Level: 16
- Strength: 36
- Defense: 35
- Speed: 35
- Health: 35
- HP: 35/35
- Intelligence: 20
- Books Read: 20
- Food Eaten: 0
- Job: Sprout Tender
Prim's story goes hand in hand with a boy named Jamie.
Jamie is twelve. He loves playing outside; he loves the rain, the smell of sweetgrass, the feeling of the sun warming the back of his neck. He's a kind, short boy with a round face and smiling eyes.
Jamie is quiet and shy and alone, most days. The kids tease and torment him because his father sometimes comes to school in dirty, gasoline-streaked clothing, and because his own skin is dark -- darker than anyone in his small class of eleven.
He doesn't have many friends.
--
Jamie's walking home one rainy day as wind and cold rain nip at his face, soaked to the bone in a mud-streaked sweater.
(At school, he'd been pushed down into the mud. It was a new sweater his mother had knit for him; deep crimson and soft to the touch, like sheep's wool, but it was ruined now.)
As he passes an alley, something catches his eye: a cardboard box, forgotten and decaying at the base of a crumbling brick building.
He finds a puppy inside. She's shivering and sopping wet, but she raises her head and wags her tail feebly.
She looks at him like he is the sun.
--
Jamie takes the puppy back to his house. The first thing he feeds her is warm stew -- fragrant with chicken and thick broth, taken from the pot his mother had put on for supper.
She's emaciated and skinny, all sharp angles and thin bones. He nurses her back to health.
He names her Prim, after the flowers that his mother likes to grow.
--
She's scared, at first, when she looks up into the cold rain and sees Jamie leaning over her. But when gentle eyes find hers and when tentative hands lift her from the broken box, she stills. Leans into his warm sweater, exhausted, and sleeps.
He gives her food and water and wraps her injured leg. It will never heal properly and she will never run as gracefully as her brothers and sisters, but she doesn't mind. The boy reads to her sometimes -- she doesn't understand what he's saying, but the soft lull of his voice is relaxing, and she lies with her head on his lap and listens to him as he cards his fingers, over and over, at the nape of her neck.
They grow older together.
--
Jamie's seventeen when he dons a cap and jacket, splashed with patterns of olive green and brown and tan. He wears brown combat boots and has a pack at his feet that smells of dust and gunpowder.
He kneels down in front of Prim. Threads solemn fingers through the curls at her back.
"Wait for me," he says.
--
In the morning when she wakes, he is gone.
--
One year on and Prim is now six, a little older, maybe a little wiser. A little more tired, if Jamie were still around to press her about it.
Prim doesn't blame him for being gone, though. Life here is barely bearable some days, what with the sound of construction around the neighborhood that is always, always in the air. It's probably her own fault too, for sitting on the porch on all days and at all hours. Past the trees, the sounds of rising infrastructure filter in, bringing with it stray leaves that wander onto the porch on windy days.
--
Three years on and Prim is nine now, still hopeful, still setting her favorite ball down at the base of his bed every night. Her bad leg aches when she sits on the porch for too long. Jamie is nowhere to be found, but Prim doesn't forget. Not the soft press of his face against hers, not the sound of his laugh as he tussles with her in the sweet spring grass, not anything at all if she can help it.
Jamie's mother walks with her most evenings. The routes are never the same without Jamie, though. (Jamie, racing with her, despite her bad leg, across fields of goldenrod and wheat; Jamie, who climbs the orchard trees in summer, and lets fall red, ripe apples that she cannot reach. Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.)
Prim sometimes hears Jamie's mother cry at night, but she doesn't really understand why.
--
Six years on and Prim is twelve now, watching the sky darken over a young city. It's that time of year when the smell of ozone is always, always on the air, when the curtains blow inwards all night long.
("Wait for me," he'd said. She'll wait.)
--
Eight years, ten, fourteen.
There had been a boy in the rain, once.
Warm stew, a sweater.
Prim thinks she remembers it right.
Pet Treasure
Brown Handmade Puppy Plushie