For a year and a half, i spent my time with Frank and Polly, being the most perfectly behaved daughter, the best a daughter could be. To tell the truth, it was the most boring time i ever had.
I was home schooled, so i never had or made any friends. My next-door neighbors were all seniors and sat around all day drinking water and reading last week's Sunday paper. There were no dog, cats, or any kind of pets in the neighborhood.
My foster parents fussed with me and treated me like a long-lost daughter. I think they wanted me to be the daughter they never had, on account of Polly having some problems they never discussed.
Frank and Polly had nephews and nieces and brothers and sisters, but they all lived somewhere too far away to visit. So i never talked to anyone but Frank and Polly. Since they weren't exactly conversation material to a ten-year-old girl like me, we didn't talk all that much either.
The house always seemed very empty, very unloved and full or missing holes. Returning from errands, I would notice stillness in the air that hit me as I walked through the door, thin, but still there, an unmistakable cloud of gloom settling throughout the house.
There were no pictures anywhere, save the large, gold-framed picture of my foster parents at their wedding. It was hung above their bed, which I had seen a glimpse of once, just a quick flash through a small open slit of their door that had been supposed to be shut. There were no vacation pictures. None of those just-because photographs pf them smiling. Not even store-bought ones to fill the bare, dull white walls.
■□■□■□ The room i slept in was very white, like every other room in the house. With quiet streets and always seemingly absent pedestrians, there was nothing else to see outside my window, aside from the dreary, lonely tree on the front lawn.
Somehow, i always felt trapped all the time. Isolated and unmissed, with the world moving, passing time without me. And almost every minute of the day, i thought about the orphanage and Fay and everyone else. How they were doing. If they missed me and wished i was there with them.
Or if they completely forgot about me and moved on, never thinking about me at all.
But most of the time, I wondered if this was what my life was to be like forever until i grew up, if I was to spend my days endlessly wishing for something to change.
And then, something did happen. Either God or someone or something had heard my thoughts, because two weeks before my eleventh birthday, Frank and Polly died in a hit-and-run car accident. I was told it was a quick death. No pain.
Everything they owned was turned over to the government, since no written will had been found, money included. Once again, I was orphaned. Though strangely, I didn't feel any grief.
Creative
Created on 4-7-07
Views(198)
Story Rating G
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