Asha's Beginnings - Her Own Story in the Pigtail Monster Chronicles

Asha's Roots -
Her Own Story in the Pigtail Monster Chronicles
By Eva Marie Woywod and friends- Dedicated to Mom.

The other children move like schools of fish—laughing in bright, sudden bursts, turning all at once when someone shouts a name, touching without thinking. Asha watches from the edge of the playground or from the nurse’s cot when the pain drives her there again, and she feels like something stitched together wrong: seams aching, colors mismatched, stuffing leaking when no one is looking.

So she stays home more and more. Teachers send packets. Her mother leaves them on the desk with a glass of flat ginger ale and a kiss on the forehead that feels like an apology.

Asha teaches herself.

She sits cross-legged on the window seat, knees sharp under the old quilt, two long red-brown braids brushing the pages when she leans in too far. The library books come from the bookmobile that parks on the corner every other Wednesday—heavy volumes with cracked spines and gold lettering rubbed half away. She chooses the ones she can barely carry.

Castles first. Then cathedrals that took three hundred years to finish, raised by men who knew they would never see the spires touch the sky. She traces flying buttresses with a finger that trembles some days and doesn’t on others. She reads about gargoyles set so high only God and the birds ever saw their faces—ugly on purpose so the beauty inside would shine brighter. She wonders if anyone ever climbed up there to whisper secrets to the stone monsters, and whether the monsters kept them safe the way they guarded the roof.

Next come the pyramids, older than any name she can pronounce. Children dragging limestone under a sun that never cooled. How were they not crushed? Did they have secrets like hers? Did their bellies ache for reasons no priest could read in the stars?

She devours Greek myths, Roman, Norse—anything the library has. Orphans flung into constellations. Little girls chased by gods wearing beautiful faces. She lingers longest on Persephone—taken, tricked, half her life spent underground—and wonders if Demeter ever noticed her daughter came back pale and quiet each spring, picking at pomegranate seeds, flinching when someone reached for her hand.

Asha keeps a notebook no one is allowed to open. Inside she writes the questions the books refuse to answer:

When did secrets begin? Was there ever a first child told to be quiet who believed it? Did the cave children have them—the ones who painted bulls by torchlight? Was someone hurting them in the dark between one flicker and the next? Did the children who stacked the first ziggurat, who carved the first winged bull, who set the first rose window in place—did any of them carry something that made their bones hurt the way mine do?

In the margins she draws the brown-brick cathedral from her dreams, tall and distant, glowing as though lit from within by every tear Zebra hasn’t yet collected. Beneath it, in tiny letters:

If I ever get there, will someone have left the door open for children like me?

Some afternoons the pain is so loud she can’t read. She lies on her side, cheek against Zebra’s worn stripes, staring at the real world outside—kids on bikes, dogs chasing balls, mothers calling names that are not hers. Her body feels like a coat sewn too tight.

I don’t fit, she thinks. Not here.

But maybe, in one of those old places where people built things to outlast their own lives, the stones remember. Maybe the gargoyles and sphinxes and blind stone angels know exactly when the secrets began and are still keeping watch.

Maybe Zebra will fly her there one night when the pain finally sleeps.

Until then she keeps reading, keeps teaching herself the names of buttresses and obelisks and forgotten gods, keeps adding to the notebook no one will ever see—because if she can learn enough about the children who came before, maybe she can find the moment the world started teaching some of us to disappear.

And maybe, just maybe, she can unlearn it.

Tonight the pain has settled into a dull, familiar drum low in her belly and behind her eyes. The house is quiet; even the hallway clock has stopped scolding. Asha lies on her back, quilt to her chin, Zebra tucked under one arm like a small striped shield.

She closes her eyes tight—the way she did when she was four and still believed squeezing them hard enough could make the bad things vanish—and whispers the only prayer she knows by heart, the one her grandmother taught her while together they were snapping green beans for bean salad.

“Saint Thérèse, the Little Flower… please pick me a rose from the heavenly garden and send it to me with a message of love. Ask God to grant the favor I implore and tell Him I will love Him each day more and more.”

Her voice is barely a breath. Then, softer still, the part she never says aloud:

Let me smell the roses tonight. Let the scent be strong enough to cover everything else. Let me sleep without remembering.

A cool wisp of air crosses her cheek, as though someone opened a window in July. And with it, roses—deep, old-fashioned, the kind that climb abandoned church walls and bloom only when no one is looking. The scent is so real her eyes sting. It smells exactly like Grandma.

She feels it before she sees it: the softest touch, lighter than a moth wing, settling against her skin. A single white feather, edges shimmering with the same Christmas-morning light that lives in her dreams. It rests on her cheek for one heartbeat, two, then slides to the pillow as gently as a promise.

Asha’s mouth curves—not quite a smile, but close enough for tonight.

Thank you, she thinks, because words are too heavy.

Somewhere far above, the quiet watcher inclines her head, silver hair drifting like moonlight on water, and moves on to the next dark window, the next small heartbeat fighting to stay brave.

The feather stays.

By morning it will be gone, folded back into whatever sky Selene keeps them in. But tonight it is real, and warm, and proof.

Proof that someone saw. Proof that someone is still counting the children who carry secrets older than their bones.

Asha sleeps. And for the first time in months, the dream that comes is not of falling.

It is of flying—quiet, slow, held—over a brown-brick cathedral whose rose window is made of every tear Selene has ever caught, glowing soft against the night.

She is almost twelve. Almost broken. Almost brave.

Tonight, almost held.