Word Count: 230
Once a year I drive up here, two hundred miles each way. Every year on your birthday, or if it snows bad, on the anniversary of your death in June. Just because I will always remember. Just because I can never forget.
You were a beautiful baby, my Marilee Jean. I was just seventeen and alone but I wanted to have you, wanted to keep you, my adorable, warm, rosy-cheeked blonde little girl who was the first thing I could call all my own. Who depended on me, whose first smile was for me, who would have taken your first steps into my proud outstretched arms.
The trail is overgrown, almost lost in the woods, new trees shade your grave, but I find you. Like your laugh and your chubby pink fingers, it is engraved like a map on my heart. I alone know you’re here and I will always come see you, though no one else but the birds and the scurrying squirrels come to spend some time in your sleep.
I’ll sing you a lullaby, rock you in memory. My heart breaks. We were all packed and ready to go but you did nothing but cry. I was impatient and scared of the move, scared of your crying. I was so young. Too young to know better. I’m so sorry. I just didn’t know what to do.
‘Too young to know better’ – and the pity is that with age we don’t always know better either. Your brand of horror is painfully real.
Yes,it seems to me that the reality of human nature is often more horribly evil than what the mind can conjure up in fantasy.
Wow. Another great story, Susan. It’s a sad piece that leaves me wondering the details, imagining all the possibilities left unsaid.
Thanks, Linda! I really do feel that the horror in life is most often borne along with the possibilities of reality.