Sword Maiden
an excerpt

That was the moment when the world had seemed too small to her. It felt like her mother was smothering her at that moment even though she was at an arm’s length. It felt like the doctor was hovering over her and taking up her air. The chair itself didn’t seem large enough for her body and the walls were slowly coming together around her. She could feel her heart beating in her chest and knew that she was beginning to breathe faster but she couldn’t bring herself to control it. Cancer. She knew that word. It was a final word. It was a word that ended lives and families. Grandfathers and fathers of friends had been taken by Cancer. She knew people who were always afraid of Cancer because it ran in their families. (She didn’t understand how Cancer could run in a family, did it have a body?) She even knew that Cancer sometimes affected kids but that was the worst kind. The children would lose their hair and they would be looked upon with pity and sadness for the rest of their lives until they died.
Was she going to die? She wondered. At that moment the world went black for an instant and she was whisked away. She was in the open plain. Wild grass grew around her that was waist high. The air around her was fresh and full of the scent of the Earth. Grass, sun, trees and dirt; nothing to hide the beauty of the world around her. She looked down at herself, a little older in body. She could tell, she could see that her breasts had gotten bigger, her feet as well. She wore a sundress, something simply and nondescript. It felt lovely on her skin and seemed to breathe on its own. The cares of her life were lifted away from her and she only knew that her future had any possibility that she could ever want.