Avayla

I can hardly forget a face and a name. Avayla. It rings like the toll of a bell, broadcasting a blessing. Every interlocutor seems to her a friend in the most sincere sense of the word. She slathers those words in a rich sauce of humble generosity. Though you may not recount them, their sentiment lingers like a perfume, waxed and buffed into the pores of your skin. Her voice, guarded by milk-white teeth and encased in an aura like honey. Her eyes, amber-brown, the edges of which were baked by a solar flare to a honey-golden crisp. All that light, beaming with innocence. How can one put divinity in a uniform, sold at nine dollars an hour and some change? It would be a sin to strip her name to its clinical, government-given typeface. If she were to be convicted of anything, it would be plagiarizing her hair from the very shade of autumn's walnut-brown leaves. No, it is a silk gown with tassels, ornamented with golden clasps. They seal the ends of three braids, at precisely the inch that God intended as if a single centimeter off could throw the whole world off its axis.