Hello, Sophia
an excerpt

For as long as the village could remember; there was no outside. There was only their little town which was their world and universe. No one spoke of visiting families nor did they mention anything relating out of their own politics and village business. The settlement was small and news would spread rather fast among the lips of the curious people and their children would mature into adults to repeat the process which their parents had done before.
Live.
There were woods surrounding the village; thick and black with a foreboding sense of hatred and adulterated people remaining within its forest shaped walls. No one dared enter the forest nor did anyone have the urge to even know anything much about it other than the fact that it was malevolence and erroneous. Life was a normal thing where people died without knowing and lived without caring to know.

Until Sophia.

There was always something unusual lingering around Sophia.
Her hair was a shade too murky of black and chocolate eyes were far to slanted to even appear naïve from an early age; an obsession with nature also made her different from the rest of the children her age. Six had been the age she started all these random tendencies as well as a commanding tone and a strangely unnatural glare to those who would cross her path. Sophia always made it clear on things she disliked and things she liked by her actions as she would show her disapproval by tossing away the thing or hitting the individual that upset her; quite obviously showing the contrary when things met her tastes.
No one spoke of going outside but the village’s earliest memory of Sophia was her blatant question of the horrifying woods that kept the people at bay from anywhere else. She would often stand right beside the trees as the warnings of creatures that would grab her in the shadows of the trees’ large branches; not that Sophia, in her oddity, minded much of the idea of being carried away. On some days Sophia would trudge home caked in mud and sweat and other she would skip through the door and pull herself a book from the shelf before retreating back outside till the late hours caused her to crawl back home, disenchanted.
Her father was a writer and, in his own right, an eccentric soul himself but he never pushed the extremes of questioning the set rules as Sophia did. Her mother was a housewife that always seemed to smile and never bothered with the peculiarity that stigmatized her child and she met all her guests with a laugh and a smile. People wondered how such amazingly polite and normal people could produce such an anomalous and downright wrong child. They kept to themselves on that matter and simply ignored the existence of Sophia and warned their children to do the same and no associate with the foolhardy girl with questions brimming from her cup.
There was a boy he picked up well in English.
When Sophia was seven, the eleven year old child would visit her father and learn from him the many ways of writing which always enchanted the daughter of the teacher. Sophia, herself, was curious of the boy’s unruly blonde hair that seemed to shine by itself from reflections of the sun and blue eyes that bottled up any light that might have escaped and shone it through the blue tinge. She was intrigued by the speed of his hands and the neatness of his handwriting and she was fascinated by how easily he was upset by simply mistakes and would usually cry out angrily before scratching the entire page into nothing but black ink.
“What is your name?”
She asked one day, polite and soft as she sat there opposite the boy working with his eyes flashing a blazed glory of creativity. He did not look up from his paper and his fingers continued to maneuver quickly over the page that was once black but replied in a quick and curt way.

“Alex.”

Sophia smiled that day. A long, large smile that stretched across her face as her hair would drape over her dark eyes during these times; a frightening appearance of someone, especially a child, as she repeated the name in her own tone with a slow pronunciation and almost a savory way of speaking it. She laughed at him as he accidentally cut his hand on the paper and small droplets of red stained the page he had been working on and be glared towards her coldly before wandering up to get material to stop it from marking anything else.

Sophia enjoyed Alex’s company more than anything at the moment in time. Sophia had a habit of getting bored rather easily, especially with people, and would lose interest in a person she had once found fascinating. Her intrigue with Alex never wavered as she would sometimes rummage through his bag when he came and she had returned from school, despite his protests from his position against the desk working, and she would wonder if he had ever gone to school.

Alex rode a bicycle everywhere. It was rather large for him but it was known that in a few years time he would grow into using it properly. The color was a bright, new maroon that glimmered through the branches of the tree that hung over it that shaded it from the direct contact with the sunlight; saving it from much damage. Alex parked it in the same place every time he arrived home, which was just beside Sophia’s, and he would make sure it was clean and properly working before he got on it once more. Sophia never liked his idea of being careful and would sometimes get a sharp stone and run it along the paint of his handle bars.

She was scolded when she was caught but still found time to do it a few times again.

Sophia never liked the idea of growing up and Alex was doing just that. As he entered a higher level of school, he stopped coming to Sophia’s father for training. Sophia never liked the idea of Alex leaving therefore she found it unsuitable for him to leave just yet.

The very next day she announced this to her father, Alex returned with a large notebook at hand and an unwavering sense of duty to fill it. To an obvious extent, this pleased Sophia very much.

But then came a day….Alex stopped coming.