4,5,6 Out of ‘trol.

She sat on my lap, with those ringlet curls. Her pudgy fingers grasping my elbows, leaning back oh-so-far, scaring herself giddy.

She’d pull herself up, just to do it all over again.

I’d tickle her belly every time she stretched, her screams of glee contagious.

She pulled herself up quickly, looked me dead in the eye. As serious as a four year old could muster she asked, “If the bad guys go to The No (prison), where do all the good guys go?”

I explained simply, “The good guys live in the rest of the world. They’re free.”

She giggled, nearly maniacally.

“Sissy, that makes no sense.”

She leaned back again, waiting for me to tickle. When I didn’t right away she said,

“The goodens should be kept together. That’s why we have big houses.”

1 + 1 = Chopsticks on the counter.

She called me this afternoon as I was getting ready to leave my house. School has let out for the summer, and the idleness has already swept in. Alone with her thoughts and wearing out her favorite camera, she takes a break. She told me she was hiding in a tree as she talked to me “because no one ever looks up anymore”.

In not too many days she turns 11, which worries her.
“No one takes an 11 year old seriously. How did you manage to survive it?”

She mentioned something about a summer love, how some boy with a typical name is surprising to her.
“I read that book you gave me, and there doesn’t seem to be much behind his name. What am I supposed to do with that?”

When asked how her music lessons with Pookah were going she became frazzled.
“I don’t think he understands what I say. When I say movement I mean damn movement!”

After I commented on her foul language she cited our Grandfather that she barely remembers, save for the stories I tell her.
“Swearing is hard to do poetically. We must try frequently to achieve this.”

She asked me to tell her a story of how it all used to be. The little thing as nostalgic as me, taking comfort in the what was.
“I know we’re not morons, I know we’re not stupid, but is it foolish? Is that what a fool is? We can be fools together… Right?”

She does this thing when something really makes her feel. This reverberating silence, not unlike the pulse before a thunderstorm. And when those moments hit, it’s best to not poke her, though I always do. It’s out of preparation that I do this to her. Better me than some asshole.
“Sissy, I love you, okay? But I really hate you too.”

Yes, babydoll, it’s okay.
Just don’t forget it.
The of it all.

Sweet lilac perfume.

There is a young girl 300 miles away that holds a skeleton key to a door, to a place, that she doesn’t remember.

The young girl rolls the key over in her unworn hand, paying attention to the nicks and scratches. Every once in a while, when under an ancestral haunting, she brings the key to her nose and inhales. The metallic scent so strong she feels it in her teeth, as if she licked instead of smelled.

On her better days, when she allows herself to be the child that her age shows, she makes up wonderful stories about what the key unlocks, and what hides behind the doors. Once, a long, long time ago, in a far away place, her older sister told her the story of The Lady and the Tiger. The tiger to her wasn’t a thing of fear, but something incredibly ordinary. -She made sure in her flights of fancy that there was always a Lady behind her doors.

The young girl thinks about things inappropriate for her age. She worries like an adult about grown up concepts and situations. She places a pressure onto herself and has nightmares of the black box crushing her in her sleep, like those many before her, and surely after her in her bloodline.

The young girls calls a phone number and is relieved to hear the voice on the other end. She misses the person and is scared by what she feels. The person on the other end, her sister, before closing the conversation for the night, tells the young girl, “Please baby girl, please allow yourself to be a child.”

The young girl promises without thinking.

That night, while the young girl is supposed to be sleeping, she opens her bedroom window and crawls out onto the roof. She lays on her back, staring up at the sky and tells the stars her story, like she used to do when she was a little girl, when her she couldn’t live with her sister anymore. Her sister told her that every night they were apart as long as they told the stars their stories, they’d remain together. That the stories would come to the other while they slept. Upon waking, you’d realize the stories that were told through the night, and smile, because you really were right there after all.

The sister, wakes with a jolt that night. She saw the young girl on the roof in her dreams, much like she used to do as a child. She felt the ache from within the young girl, and heard her cries that she hid from the world. The cries that she was made to feel she wasn’t supposed to have.

The sister wrapped herself in a shawl that still smelled of her mother, and retreated to her backyard through the bedroom window. She lays in the middle of the grass on her back and focuses on stars. The sister, terribly wrecked that she couldn’t be with the young girl, told the stars the time that she first fell in love with young girl. How in that very moment, someone else noticed and snapped a picture. How no matter what happens, that feeling is still the same, and incomparable to anything else that has ever existed, or yet to exist. She told the stars how nights like these she’d play with young girls hair until she fell asleep. How she wouldn’t have bad dreams any longer. How Baku would protect her, and be there always.

That night, the young girl fell asleep on the roof, and the sister fell asleep in the grass. They mirrored each other in sleep, with arms outstretched.

(Non potranno mai tenerci a parte.)