Between Lost & Found - Chapter 1

‘Once upon a time there was a broken girl,’ the girl thought as she scrubbed the merciless wooden floor. She hated scrubbing those damned floors. Out of all the chores she had, it was the worst. The cold, hard floor bit into her knees as she worked the brush back and forth. It would soon be filthy again. People walked their muddy feet on it. How was it ever meant to stay clean? Nevertheless, she scrubbed. 

The brown bubbles of soap and grime clung to her bony fingers. Her clothes were a similar colour to the dirty bubbles, as was everything in the orphanage. Everything in the girl’s life seemed to be a variant of brown or beige, even the sky most days. Her life was a canvas and the artist painting on it had only one colour. She longed for more colour. She longed for rainbows and light and more. 

Sometimes, when the sun was still young in the sky, she would stare out the bedroom window, down onto the street below, just to feast on the many colours of the ladies’ dresses down below. But the feast would never last long, if the sisters did not find her spying first, the feasting would soon turn to daydream, and she would start imagining that one of those ladies was her mother. And day dreaming in a place like the orphanage was a perilous undertaking.

The daydream would start out simple enough. She was upstairs in the nursery of their grand home, the noises of the other children behind her would be the sounds of her brothers and sisters. She would be waiting for her mother to come back from the market. Some days her mother would be wearing red with golden hair, other days yellow with the hair of freshly roasted chestnuts. Sometimes, if she was lucky, she would see a woman with the same midnight hair as herself. 

She had received the strap one morning for accidentally waving to one of the ‘daydream mothers.’ The woman had complained to one of the sisters. The girl’s hands had to be bandaged for weeks. 

Now, the bandages were off and she was back scrubbing floors. 
While down on the floor, on this particular day, she heard a sweet clicking sound. It seemed to be coming from under a nearby chair. She subtly scrubbed her way over to the chair and, while the sister was not looking, she peered into the gloom under the chair. A sparkle of pearly blue caught her eye. 

She reached underneath and pulled out a beautiful blue-black beetle. Its shell shone in the flickering candle light as she held it out in her scarred palm. It was as pretty as a precious stone. ‘Don’t worry,’ whispered the girl. ‘I’ll keep you safe.’ She carefully tucked the beetle into the pocket of her brown dress and returned to scrubbing.

‘You! Ebony haired girl! Stop bloomin’ day dreamin’ already and scrub!’ screeched one of the sisters. 

The girl looked down at what she was doing. She had the brush in her hand and she was moving it back and forth. ‘I am scrubbing,’ she mumbled. 

‘What did you say?’ The sister’s tone was that of an alley cat on heat.

The girl cringed and closed her eyes. She looked up. All the other orphans had stopped scrubbing to watch. Some even had wicked grins lurking on their smug, dirty faces. 

The girl sat up on her haunches and looked the sister in the eyes. ‘I’m in trouble now anyway,’ thought the girl. 

‘I. Am. Scrubbing,’ she said loudly, pronouncing every syllable. 

The sister descended on her like a gray bat, all flapping robe wings and scratching claws. She grabbed the girl by the ear and dragged her to the Head Sister’s office. 

The girl kicked and squealed. She never gave up without a fight.
The sister flung the door open and threw the girl inside. ‘Mother, this one’s back talkin’ again,’ said the sister, prodding the girl harshly in the spine.

The mother, a woman as plump as a Christmas ham with snaggleteeth and no neck, growled at the girl. She slid her chair over to a drawer where she kept their files, the legs of the chair ground on the wooden floor like the claws of a giant beast from a fairy tale. The girl wondered how the spindly legs of the chair didn’t give way under the mother’s mighty weight.

‘What’s your name again, girl?’ asked the mother.
The girl went to speak but received a slap to the back of her head from the sister. 

‘Ouch,’ said the girl, rubbing her head. 

‘Ahh, yes,’ said the mother, getting out a file with the girl’s name on it. ‘Silly name for such a miserable, little urchin like you. Been ‘ere since you was a babe. Think you’d know better by now.’ 

‘I was scrubbing, Mother, I promise,’ said the girl, the word mother in relation to this woman tasted bitter on her tongue. 

‘And I s’pose you weren’t day dreamin’ t’all then?’ said the mother.

The girl paused for a moment.

‘See, Mother, the girl lies,’ said the sister, tugging hard on the girl’s hair. 

‘Ouch,’ cried the girl and, without thinking, she stomped backward onto the sister’s toes. 

The sister jumped around and hollered. The mother chuckled. She was not biased with her cruelty.

‘Compose yerself, Sister!’ The mother’s face changed into a hardened stone scowl. ‘You’re a feisty one, aren’t ya? Come, let’s see if we can break that spirit of yours.’

The girl hung her head and held out her hands, palms up. The red, raised scars that crisscrossed her palms still angry from the last time. 

The girl closed her eyes.




The girl sat outside in what little sun could make it through the smog. Her bones ached with the cold and the damaged skin on her hands stung. The bandages that the sister had wrapped around her hands were grubby, the same colour as the dirty soap bubbles on the floor she had been scrubbing, the same colour as the sky. 

She felt movement in her pocket and remembered the new friend she had found earlier. Standing up to have a walk around the small enclosed yard, she took the beetle out of her pocket. Its fluffy little feelers searched around in the open air and it clicked happily.

‘I told you I’d keep you safe,’ said the girl. And she began to sing quietly to herself as she walked.

Suddenly, she felt something large and hard strike the back of her head and she was falling forward before she could stop herself. Pain shot up through her hands as they struck the cobbles and it ricocheted up her arms.

She heard laughter behind her as a group of kids came over, the ones who had thrown the large rock that now lay in the dirt beside her. 
The girl’s head swam as she tried to blink away the black and white spots that swirled across her vision. Everything became shadowy.

‘Look at her, Richard! She’s presenting like a mare! Quick, in ya get,’ said one of the boys to another uproar of laughter.

The girl rolled over onto her hindquarters. The pain in her hands throbbed and she kept her eyes on the group of kids that had come over to taunt her, least they have more than one rock.

The boy that had thrown the rock pushed his friend, Richard, towards the girl. ‘Stop it, Thomas,’ said Richard, taking a swing at the rock thrower. ‘I’ll bloody catch something.’

The girl felt the pain in her heart as they all laughed at her. ‘Why don’t you all just sod off!’ Her voice broke as tears fell out onto her dirty cheeks.

‘Why don’t you all just sod off!’ they all mocked in high-pitched voices as they jeered and turned around as if she wasn’t even worth the effort of teasing. They all walked away and the girl looked to her bleeding palms to see the beetle that she had saved or what was left of its little carcass. Silvery wings and the scattered shell, nothing more than blue glitter and entrails.

Feel free to make any comments. I hold up to scrutiny! I'll post more next week.

Hugs AMC

xxx

First Chapter - Dead Bunnies Make All Eight Of Me Cry

Chapter 1. All eight of me.

It was Uncle David who first decided to take me to therapy.

I’ve been to heaps of shrinks, tried so many different treatments and medications in my thirty-six years. Some work for a while, pushing the shadows aside for a time. But they always come back.

The drugs are just like sticking a band aid over the wound of a severed limb. The ones that do ‘work,’ leave me numb. I can’t function. I can’t hold a conversation or a job or a memory. I’m a tree without leaves in the autumn – I’m alive, but not.

‘I’m taking you to see a really nice lady, okay Suzie Q?’ Uncle David said to me as he took me by the hand.

I was seven.

By that time, I had been caught sleepwalking or been brought home by Jason (the young fella whose yard Violet seemed to prefer) so many times. It affected my aunt and uncle so badly that sometimes no one in the house slept but me.

He kept smiling at me the entire drive to the kiddie shrink. But his eyes weren’t smiling. Even as a small child I could see his worry. I took out my little black feather and stroked it against my face.

The doctor’s office was fake cheerful. It had partitions of kid’s paintings and cute little murals on the walls, a corner with used toys for us to play with and bright yellow curtains with happy little clowns performing all over them. But I could see through it. Under all the bright colours, it was just like the foster home. Sterile and shadowy.

Uncle David walked in to the office with me. I held onto his hand. I didn’t want him to go, but something in me just knew that the doctor was going to say that he had to.

The doctor stood at the door, holding it open for us as we passed through. She was very tall for a woman, taller than my uncle and wiry. Her office smelled like cleaning products and stale jellybeans. She had several bean bags in a corner and a bookshelf full of colourful figurines. They were all different shapes and sizes. There was music playing in the background, I recognised the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep.

‘Hello, Mr O’Brien, my name is Dr Kerry Sonson.’ The doctor held out her hand to shake my uncle’s. He took it and she shook his hand with vigour, placing her other hand over the top of his. ‘And this must be little Suzie,’ she said, knelling down to me. ‘You can call me Kerry, okay?’

She stood back up and said quietly to my uncle, ‘It’s … necessary for the guardian to leave the room in my treatments. I apologise if this is not suitable for you, but … it’s the way I work.’

Uncle David nodded and smiled weakly. He bent down to me. He looked into my eyes, like he was searching for something. ‘I’ll just be out here, okay Suzie Q?’ He held my hand tightly.

Dr Kerry bent down too. ‘I have some toys over here that I want to show you. Would you like to come have a look?’ She held out her hand to me.

I turned away from her and flung myself into my uncle’s arms. He laughed nervously.

‘It’s okay, Suzie Q. I’ll just be on the other side of that door. I promise I’m not leaving you. Okay?’ He started to pry me off his body. Pushing me away from him hesitantly. The doctor took me gently by the hand and began to lead me towards the big bookshelf full of toys and I watched as my uncle stood up and exited the room, never taking his eyes off me.

I looked up at the seemingly giant bookcase. Figurines filling every shelf, all set out and evenly spaced. ‘Suzie, I would like you to pick out some toys to play with? Pick as many as you want. If you can’t reach one that you want, just tell me and I will get it down for you,’ said the doctor.

I picked out several toys, mostly from the top three shelves that I couldn’t reach. Dr Kerry showed me over to a sandbox that was on the opposite side of her room. She climbed into the sand, first flicking off her modest heels and placing her stockinged toes in the white sand.

‘Take off your shoes and come in, Suzie,’ she said holding a hand out to me. I looked at the sandpit. My mum had never let me go in them. She had always told me they were dirty.

I slipped off my shoes. I looked at the doctor’s outstretched hand and took it, stepping into the sand with the caution of someone stepping into a pit of fire.

‘Do you not like the sand, Suzie?’ the doctor asked.

‘Mum always told me that sandpits are dirty. She said cats … poop in them,’ I said, whispering the last bit.

The doctor laughed a kind, light-hearted chuckle. ‘I can promise you that no cats have pooped in this sandpit,’ she said.

I sat down in the sand and dumped all my toys onto its surface. ‘What do you want to play?’ I asked.

‘I want you to play whatever you want to play,’ she said.

I looked down at my choices and started to play. Making the toys interact with one another.

After a while, the doctor spoke. ‘Who’s this, under here?’ she said, pointing to a toy buried under the sand.

‘My mum,’ I said and continued to play.

‘And who are these three?’ she asked, pointing to some toys that sat atop a castle I had made.

‘Em and Aunt Miriam and Uncle David,’ I said, not straying from my play.

‘And these guys over here?’ she asked, pointing to a circle of toys.

‘That’s me,’ I said.

‘Okay, and this one?’ she singled out one of the toys in the circle.

‘That one’s me too,’ I said.

‘I thought you said that this one was you?’ she asked, pointing to the first.

‘They’re all me,’ I said.

I had begun sleep walking when I was six years old.

I still remember the first time they found me. I sat in a chair in the Police station, with no memory of what had happened previously, swinging my legs above the ground and clutching my pillow. There was a young man standing in front of me talking to an officer. The officer nodded seriously and wrote everything down. The young man had found me and brought me there.

I heard the slip slap of thongs on running feet. ‘Suzie!’ Uncle David had yelled.

I looked up to see him running towards me, dodging the rows of seats in the police waiting room. ‘Uncle David!’ I had never been so happy to see him in my entire life. I jumped off the chair and ran to him, hugging his legs.

The young man and the police officer looked at Uncle David with surprise and both walked over to him. The policeman was the first to talk. ‘Is this your niece?’

‘Yes, we woke up this morning and she was just gone.’ He bent down to me and looked me over. At this point I got scared. What if he was angry with me? ‘Are you okay? Where did you go?’

I started to cry and just hugged him again. I didn’t want him to be mad with me. And I honestly didn’t know where I had gone.

The young man stepped forward and cleared his throat. ‘She was asleep in my front yard this morning. My name’s Jason, by the way,’ he said, holding out his hand for Uncle David to shake. Uncle David looked at him suspiciously, but said nothing, shaking his hand anyway. ‘I woke her up to see where she had come from and at first she seemed fine. She told me her name was Violet and she had stopped to sleep under my tree, told me that she liked the funny mushrooms that were growing under it.’

Uncle David looked at me, waiting for an explanation.

‘I asked her if she had touched or eaten the mushrooms,’ Jason said, turning to the policeman. ‘Because they’re those poisonous red ones with the white spots, and she went strange, kinda off in her own world. Then she started freaking out, not knowing where she was or how she got there. Told me her name was Suzie Hugo. So I brought her here, I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘Where are the girl’s parents, Mr..?’ asked the policeman.

‘David O’Brien,’ he said as he picked me up. He turned me away from the officer and whispered. ‘I’m her guardian. Her mother’s dead. Come on, Suzie, let’s get you home.’

Uncle David walked out of the station and put me in the car. He watched me in the rear-view mirror as we drove around looking for Aunt Miriam and Emily. I stared out the window and said nothing. Later that day he bought a chain to fit to the front door.

Read the rest of Dead Bunnies. Also available for free on Wattpad. 

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Sorry for the lazy blog,

Hugs 

AMC xxx