I was walking down the street to the store. About halfway there I saw a young girl; about ten years old that was wearing a grey-green dress that reached down to her bare feet. She had long black air that hung loose, but looked like it spent most of the time up in a braid.

I thought I saw her watching me walk down the street but as I approached, she stooped over on the lawn. Though I’d never seen her before, she looked familiar. She reminded me of a very young version of the mother of an old friend of mine from elementary school. I assumed that this little girl lived in the house whose lawn she was playing on.

As I walked past, the girl threw a handful of grass on me. The blades fell through the air like confetti at a wedding, landing in my hair and on my shoulders. I kept walking thinking how silly and annoying little kids can be, when she threw more grass at me. This time pulling up weeds from the cracks in the sidewalk and throwing them at me.

Finally I turned to ask her what she thought she was doing, but the words caught in my throat as I gazed into her eyes. She had stopped covering me in grass and was gazing back at me, not with the playfulness and wonderment of a child, but with the wisdom and experience of an ancient soul.

After several minutes, she started to speak to me. As soon as she opened her mouth, I turned and ran. For some reason, I felt I didn’t want to hear what the old woman inside of her had to say. I ran home, and she ran right behind me, with as quickly and lightly as the young child who’s body she had possessed. She kept chanting one phrase over and over, but I wouldn’t listen. Or maybe I did listen, but I didn’t like what she had to say. So I continued to run, all the way home, and locked myself in the house. The girl banged on the door, screaming her message at me, but I just covered my ears and ran down the stairs to my room in the basement, and locked myself inside. I didn’t even have so much as a window to the outside world, and I could no longer physically hear the girl who I knew was still trying to get in the house, but I could feel her message. I don’t know exactly what the message was, but I know it was some sort of warning. And the longer I feel that warning, the more I wish I had stood and listened to hear what it was exactly. So now I wait, and hope that I will be visited by the young, ancient girl, with the message that seems so very important.