The following piece of flash fiction is from Morgen’s smaller short story collection (just 93 stories instead of 250!), The Story A Day May Collection, available in eBook and paperback from Amazon and Morgen’s online store where you can not only instantly download the collection but also purchase the paperback dedicated to you or as a present! We hope you enjoy this story…
The Threadbare Girl
It’s the two clocks she finds the most comforting. Both beat a different tune, started with batteries within a few seconds of each other. Alternating like an analogue tennis match.
Of course she doesn’t need two, it being such a small room and she’s not going anywhere so really she doesn’t even need one. But they keep her company. The only noise in her existence. Except for people going to work, then home. Car doors, house doors, the shouting in between. There’s no-one for her to shout at. About. Not that she would anyway. She’s too calm for that.
She only knows the seasons by the temperature of the room. With her body playing tricks on her, that’s not even accurate. She hears the radiators kick in around the house but hers isn’t working.
It’s the sun she misses the most. She sees chinks of it but it’s not the same. She can’t see the whole; her favourite fruit, high up in the sky. Burning into the skins of those allowed out. Playing, talking, oblivious to the freedom they take for granted.
She’s brought food every now and then, when he remembers. Sober enough to recall he’s not alone.
For the first few weeks she thought she’d be rescued, familiar hands picking her up, arms wrapping round her like Christmas paper, but the stranger’s arms have become familiar.
Sometimes she sits in the old empty bath; it cools her after he’s been. She needs it some times more than others, depending on what he’s expected of her.
She’s thought about drowning, but water’s a friend and a friend wouldn’t do that to her. He tells her they’re friends, special friends, and she smiles so he believes it. He’s nicer to her when she smiles so it’s an expression she’s learned to wear, glued in place as soon as she hears footsteps.
He’s told her his name is John but she doesn’t think it’s real. None of it is. It’s a three-year-long dream that loving hands will wake her up from.
He buys her clothes, always a size too small like he wants her to stay a child, as does she. “They grow up so fast,” her grandfather had said and when she sees him again she wants to be exactly the same. The tomboy who wouldn’t be seen dead in pink, but now wonders if she will be.
Everything about the room is childlike, like it was bought with her in mind; pretty pictures, toys to play with – only they’ve never been touched. She wishes she were a toy.
Her smile snaps in place as the stairs creak. She hears the bolt and the door hinges complain. She’d tried that once.
Her smile’s still in place as the arms reach out to her. She’s frozen to the spot, near the bath, in her pink and purple cotton summer dress.
The hands recoil as they touch her skin as if electrocuted by the cold.
*
“Good God, Ted!” The woman in the black trouser suit looked up at her colleague.
“You only need to look at her, Amanda, to know she’s freezing,” the older man added, scanning the room: a toilet, bath and cot, too small for a child her age. “Where’s she been sleeping?”
“I’m not sure she has,” Amanda replied.
Knowing how long the girl had been missing, Amanda battled with what to say to her. She wasn’t trained for this.
As if reading her mind, Ted crouched beside her.
The girl flinched.
“It’s OK love,” Ted whispered, stood up slowly and backed away.
Amanda looked at her. Her clothes, too sheer for the time of year, were threadbare like the room she’d been kept in. “Charlie, you’re going to be fine. You’re safe now.” She knew that was the best thing to say. No point in asking her if she was alright. Even the strongest person in her position wouldn’t be alright. And she looked as thin as a wafer and just as fragile.
“Where is he?” Charlie mouthed.
Amanda looked at Ted. He shrugged his shoulders. “We don’t know,” she answered honestly.
Charlie’s eyes widened.
“It’s OK, we have someone outside watching,” Amanda lied.
Ted looked at his watch. “We should be quick.”
Charlie yelped.
“It’s OK,” Amanda repeated. “Take your time.” She removed her jacket and went to put it round Charlie’s shoulders but she recoiled. “Please,” Amanda said softly. “You’re cold. Too cold. This will make you feel better.”
Those were words Charlie had heard before, many times. After he had been with her, he’d given her some hot chocolate and told her everything would be fine, he’d make her feel better.
She frowned. She did feel a little better; that it wasn’t him, but she didn’t know them either.
“Your parents sent us to find you, Charlie,” Ted said. “They’re worried about you. They want you home.”
Charlie shook her head. He had said that. That her parents had sent him to collect her from school. But he hadn’t known her name. They knew her name. Her real name. She’d told him to call her Olivia, her sister. He’d said it was beautiful and he’d been happy. But then he’d found out her real name and got angry. Beat her. But that was a long time ago and there was nothing to prove that now. No scars on the outside.
She closed her eyes and nodded. At least she’d be with a woman. And women didn’t do bad things to little girls.
“OK, let’s go,” Ted said gently.
Amanda put her jacket around Charlie, it swamping her, then placed an arm around the girl’s shoulders, and escorted her out of the cellar, following Ted up the stairs, past the door with the squeaky hinges, into a kitchen that Charlie had never seen.
She yelped again as the sunlight hit her eyes.
“Got your sunglasses on you, Amanda?” Ted asked.
Amanda went to dip into her handbag.
“No, please,” Charlie begged, releasing Amanda’s grip. “I want to see it, to see it all. Where he lives, where I’ve been living for…”
“We’ll talk about that later, Charlie,” Ted interrupted. “We just need to get you…”
Charlie stopped walking and stared at the hall they were now standing in, then back at the kitchen. Immaculate. It was all perfect. Her grandfather had called her ‘immaculate’. Miss Perfection. Then told her how her parents had waited so long to have her. Her and Olivia. The other half of her egg. That had made her laugh. She’d wanted to have eggs for breakfast for the rest of the week. Share them with Olivia. To make up for stealing her half before she was born.
She had her back to the front door when they heard the key.
Amanda grabbed Charlie’s hand and pulled her behind her, behind the front door as it opened, leaving the two men to stare at each other.
Ted instinctively went for the inside of his jacket, for the gun that hadn’t lain there for over ten years.
John’s eyes followed Ted’s hand and he launched his bags of shopping at him, one of them knocking him off balance.
Charlie screamed and John swung round. “Olivia! What are you doing?”
Amanda, still obscuring most of Charlie, looked over at Ted who nodded.
“John,” Amanda said calmly, “Charlie needs to come with us.”
“That’s not Charlie!” he hissed. “She’s Olivia.”
“OK John,” she said, despite knowing that not to be the case. “You need to let Olivia go, let her come with us.”
“Never!” he snarled. “She’s mine!”
With John distracted, Ted crept up behind him until a floorboard in the 1930’s house gave him away and John twisted back round so the men’s faces were now inches apart.
Charlie tugged on Amanda’s hand and took off the suit jacket. Remembering what he had done to her to get her there, Charlie whispered in Amanda’s ear. With the two men not moving, she knew she had little time. She took the jacket and holding one shoulder in each fist, lunged at John throwing the jacket over his head, pressing down as hard as she could.
With John dropping to his knees, Ted pounced, bearing down on him while Amanda retrieved the mobile phone from her handbag.
“Yes, hello. Police please, and ambulance. 12 Atkinson Street. Please hurry. Thank you.”
Charlie shivered as she leaned against the radiator watching the two private detectives restrain the man she’d known as ‘John’, the man who’d been her father figure for the past three years, the ‘best friend’ in Olivia’s absence, who’d made her hot chocolate not quite like her mother used to make it.
As the radiator kicked into life, she remembered what it felt like, to feel it as well as hear it, feel the warmth she’d been missing, inside and out.
###
Hello everyone and welcome to the forty-sixth month of this competition. There were 32 entries from 20 authors for the theme of ‘the wrong card’. NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked – please do as several were disqualified this month…
When it is time to pick a card, any card, the bubbly busty blonde in the front row with the saucy smile is his choice.
Tears dripped onto the card in her hand. ‘With deepest sympathy,’ it said.
“Hello? Yes, my husband has items he’d like to donate. That would be great! Our address is 4635 Sand Hill. Thank you. Bye.”