Islands in the Sky

Each night when Daddy was home, he would tuck her in tight with a kiss on her forehead and sit down in the pink chair next to her pillow. 
"Tell me another story about your islands, Daddy," she would plead. He would take off his glasses, cough a few times, and take her hand, soon to dive into a beautiful tale of swirling, multicolored islands among the northern clouds. 
"They twinkle in deep greens, and if you listen very close you can hear the hum of lively creatures making their homes among the ever-changing isles."
"Can I ever go there?" she would ask, longing to see pictures in her father's mind. She dreamed of seeing what he saw and playing among the creatures in the islands.
The Islands in the Sky sounded like a fairy tale, and as she grew older, she became more and more suspicious. Her father's death swallowed her imagination when she turned twenty. She still wished to see the Islands in his mind, but she now knew that they did not exist. The clouds are just clouds, the land is just land, and it doesn't move or change or twinkle or hum. The mountains where her dad grew up fed his amazing imagination, but they gave her a false sense of hope throughout her childhood, and she was done pretending. 
Her father had always had a wish for his ashes to be thrown into the lake in Fairbanks, Alaska. So began her trip to her father's hometown in the middle of winter, urn in hand. 
When she arrived in Fairbanks, she found one of her father's old friends to take her out on a boat. She managed to skirt around telling him the bad news, and gave him the excuse of wanting to experience her father's childhood town.
"How's the old man doing? He was the brave one of us, most of us are still stuck here in good old Alaska! Of course I can't complain, it's got its own special beauties once you stay here long enough." He flashed her a grin that she didn't quite understand; it was like he knew something that she would soon find out.
The rickety boat started with a spurt and the propeller struggled into a roar. Night was falling, and the air was getting bitter. There was no snow on this night, however. No clouds. It was too cold for snow or clouds, and her eyes were watery from the icy wind. 
As night began to fall, she turned around to look back at Fairbanks. The mountain that her father used to love towered over the town. But it was not alone.
She pulled her hood back from her face with one big glove. Her eyes widened, reflecting greens, blues and oranges. 
She gasped with excitement and shouted over the noise of the propeller, "The islands in the sky are real!"
"What?" The man asked, grinning.
"Stop the boat!!"
The propeller came to a halt, and there was silence. Swirls of glittering green and orange danced over the peak of her father's mountain, shining bright enough to illuminate the town. She listened closely, so closely that she had to stop breathing... and she heard the hum. The hum of creatures finding homes in the islands, running with each other, dancing in the sky. The hum of her father's voice, talking her to sleep.
She opened his urn into the reflective green water, and let him go, feeling his spirit's presence for the first time.