The bleak corner unfolded its arms and embraced her into a dark, inescapable womb. It served as her sanctuary and her prison, an endearing chalice of dreams and nightmares. Thin, intermittent streaks of saline tears gushed out and sparkled down her blushing cheeks like a pair of tiny, shimmering waterfalls. The pink rose rolled and bumped on the floor in the manner of a head slaughtered off the torso, until it came to a rest against the crisp wallpaper plastered over the wall long, forgotten years ago. As her soft, innocent body broke into spasms of silent sobs, Timmy retreated further and curled himself beneath her snow – white shoes that had been blemished with a few and rather forgivable streaks of dried mud. The instinctful, vigilant eyes of the canine darted in between the fat, large human approaching with a shiny, coiled leather belt in its hand, and the path outside the open doorway that sprawls into a realm more benign than this enclosed, torturous fortress.
Her thin, endangered lips trembled and whispered out frightened sentences that crushed underneath heavy stomps of unadulterated fear, thus becoming irregular constellation of uncommunicable syllables. The flower vase rested on the tiled floor in pieces, manifesting itself into an evident testament of a recent misdeed. “ It was Timmy ” she tried to say, which was true, but her voice drowned underneath the low, menacing growls that was gurgling out from the two – legged beast stepping towards her with the patience and tenacity of a hungry predator. She knew her mummy was somewhere nearby, sipping a good cup of English Tea and reading a Botany Textbook on nomenclatures, with the indifference of a Python that watches the other Python devouring its offspring in voluptuous, fateful gulps.
The beast gripped the buckle so hard that its knuckles went sweaty and bloodless, and he let go of the loose end. The warm, yellow sunlight ushered across the glass and gleamed brown above the polished, swinging surface. She tremored and shrunk into a helpless cocoon, muffled into tears of terror, wishing she could somehow dissolve into the wall, along with her friend Timmy…
Daddy, please….. she whispered….
Story: Andy Robin
Original Painting: “In Disgrace” by Charles Burton Barber (1893).