She is five years old.
She is not enjoying herself.
She had been immensely enjoying herself, but the concussive interruption of her parents has stolen that snippet of happiness and unbridled delight from her previously mundane existence.
Her five year old brain has no concept of the enormity of the situation, nor the danger she has inadvertently placed herself and her family in.
Semi concussion raises confusion in her wee elfin like head. Pain is slowly beginning to register, and the tin taste of blood is beginning to make itself known. She is nauseous, stars and flashes of misplaced light dance before her magnificent jade coloured eyes.
Rolling unsteadily onto her left side, she see’s the filthy feet of her parents close together; their rough wooden shoes are shuffling in an eclectic dance of upset, pointing at one another all the while. A hushed highly excited conversation is exploding above her, her parents close to frantic.
Bulrush and old straw are strewn haphazardly over the dirt floor beneath her tiny feet, she lifts her grubby left hand to the equally grubby side of her face, tentatively prodding an area of numbness with slender underfed fingers. Sticky warmth is found; “why” fills her head. Her parents loved her didn’t they?
An unforeseen movement and her feet are dancing over the floor; her mother lifts her into a love filled embrace, holding her tightly, small head to her breast.
Father begins to yell and storm within the small round, conically roofed hut she calls home; arms flailing, he catches his ginger head in a low spot beneath the thatch, and is angered further.
Then he calls her “demon”, and “witch”, and “devil”. Her starved sobbing 19 year old mother continues to hold her ever so tight; she can smell the smoke of the cooking fire in her bright red hair.
Crude wooden footwear kicked off and Mother is sprinting through the rude stone sided entrance to their bothie, her home, ducking beneath the lintel in her passing. The scrap of semi-cured hide acting as a door barring the outer world from all within is flung aside; low grey skies, the smell of snow, and the bite of cold greet her. Hens and geese explode in a cacophony of screeching and honking, the noise increasing with the thrashing of wings, birds of a feather escaping the onrush of her mother, drowning out father’s raucous bellowing behind her. The sounds of the geese drop away as she passes, replaced with the feral noise of Father roaring, banging and crashing within the thatch covered bothie, utterly decimating it from inside out. She doesn’t understand why Da is so rudely cursing her, and for what?
Can’t all little girls fly?
Click upon the picture above, or else!
N.
(+61) 0418393742 – text only
editor@therebemonstershere.com
www.facebook.com/tbmonstershere/
All posts and associated intellectual properties regards ‘therebemonstershere.com’ remain ©The World Turned Upside Down.
therebemonstershere.com 