Nearly forty-two years had passed since Abuela first conjured up the little fish in her aquarium. Victoria and Alfredo’s daughter had been named Honey because of her naturally sweet scent. Until she was almost twelve, Honey had had a peaceful and happy life with her parents on a farm that cultivated vast orchards of passion fruit. There were always open fields in which to run and trees to climb, and the healthy food and fresh air gave her skin a luminous glow that caused the country folks to murmur about her in awe.

“The Passion-fruit Princess,” they called her.

However, Honey was an only child and her parents home-schooled her, so by the time she was nearly a teen, she felt the ache of loneliness for the first time. Her stomach and heart throbbed with a pain she could not explain. She walked down the stairs of her solitary white house that was surrounded by a vast field of yellow and green grasses. She paused to listen for a few minutes to a noise coming from her living room. It sounded like the drone of a small engine. Honey nervously hesitated before facing the creature that had invaded her home, as typically an uninvited visitor from the fields and woods could be a bat, a ground owl, a lost armadillo, or a deadly coral snake.

“Who’s there?”

Honey had been raised on the country’s local folk legends about the creatures that lived in Wonderland: worms the size of snakes, and snakes longer than laundry lines. Her mother, Victoria, repeated stories of local sightings of flying saucers and giant glowing phosphorescent dogs: as big as houses. It was said that these dogs roamed the fields at night and drank out of the lakes until they ran dry. Honey accepted all of these stories as fact, but then again, she knew no other life but this.

“Beware of the child-eater,” her mother had whispered. “She looks at first like a gypsy woman, but it’s only a disguise. Underneath, she’s a ravenous beast who gulps down children and stores them whole and undigested in her crowded belly.”

“Are you harmless?” Honey cautiously directed her voice at the strange noise in the next room.

Honey took a deep breath and walked towards the window. However, to her relief, this creature was not an invader, but a lost guest. It was a turquoise and green hummingbird who had approached the house to refresh himself at the feeder, but instead had flown in through a small open window and could not understand why the glass of the large bay window was not yielding for him. He drilled against it frantically, buzzing like a toy plane. As Honey approached him, his heart beat so rapidly from fear and exertion that it caused the green feathers on his chest to ripple.

Honey spoke to the hummingbird to calm him down.

“Don’t worry, pretty thing. I want to help.”

He opened his needle-like mouth, and to Honey’s surprise, an iridescent soap bubble escaped his tiny beak. The bubble expanded, swelled, and rose in the air. When it popped, his words tumbled to the ground. They expressed themselves in disarray.

“How… To help…Me?”

“Jump into my hand, and I’ll take you outside.”
Another bubble rose from his mouth. Honey followed it with her eyes as it grazed the ceiling. This time, the words rained down on pieces of cardboard. Honey chased after them and reassembled them like giant playing cards.

“What… If….I…Want Something Else?”
Honey blinked and read the cards again. “What do you want from me?” Honey asked the hummingbird. He flew around her twice and then landed on her arm. She walked out the door. “Don’t you want to fly?”

This time, he gave up on words and sent her a direct thought.

“You smell sweet and good. I could be your friend forever.”

“How?”

The hummingbird flipped from her arm like a diver and soared into the air. Then he changed direction and flew into her ear.

Honey’s entire body shook and her ear itched madly as the tiny creature burrowed its way deeper into her ear canal. She let out a scream and fell to the grass. Then instead of pain, she felt an overwhelming sense of warmth and calm. She inhaled deeply and smiled at the sky.

“If you let me stay, I will never, ever leave you,” he whispered. His twittery voice echoed inside her head. “I’ll be the one in whom you can trust and confide. I’ll be your guide through all that is good and bad in life. You’ll never be lonely again. Do you want that?”

“I want a friend like you,” Honey said. She blew an air kiss that made a smacking noise, and the air filled with the vaporous smell of hot cotton candy. The ache she had felt earlier in her stomach had mysteriously subsided.

***Author's Proceeds Donated to UNICEF.