Sunflower Girl

Kagoatweed's Rant: R&R, and be inspired, but please don't steal ideas.

A seven year-old girl gets home from school. Her father works across town. He’s not home. Her mother ran out to the store. She’s not home. The only person home is her older brother. It’s her time to explore. She starts looking through her parent’s closet. She pulls out her mother’s flowered sun hat and plops it on her head. The brim falls over her eyes. She giggles as she notices her reflection in her mother’s full-length mirror. She holds the hat up and reaches into her father’s drawer with the other hand. She finds his clip tie. She lets go of the hat and fumbles with the tie until it slips cockeyed onto the collar of her t-shirt. She reinserts her hand into the drawer, wondering if she might find the polka-dot tie her dad wears just for her. Instead she pulls out a lump of cold metal. It’s her father’s gun. She remembers when he won it at the academy. His name was inscribed on it, on a small gold plate. She runs her small fingers over it, tracing his name, the metal warming beneath her touch. She smiles. Her daddy’s gun is so pretty. She runs down the hall to her brother’s room. She rushes in and he is playing his Game Boy on his bed, so immersed in it he doesn’t even realize she enters. “Look! Look!” She exclaims. “Isn’t it pretty?” He doesn’t respond. He just keeps clicking away at his game. She instantly thinks of another thing to do. She begins tossing the gun up, just a little bit, and then she catches it again. Then she tosses it up a little more, catches it. She likes her new game.

When her mother got home, her girl was sitting on the couch, her little body thrown into convulsions and heavy sobs. Tears streaming, she looked up. She awkwardly wiped her cheek with her palm. A red smudge was left in its place. A mother’s instinct hit her and she hurried off to her son’s room. A silver and gold gun lay cradled by the carpet and a creepily joyous song drifted from the game that lay in the palm of her bloodstained boy.