Pale Pink Flowers

• Muskan Anis Charniya, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2016

A breeze of tranquility gently embraced the jaggery-sweet Cherry Blossom tree as it swayed with melody and synchrony. Growing near the sacred opal Shenshai River, its miraculous existence was well beyond the first to roam this earth. Sitting by the River, Minu’s cold eyes were hypnotically observing the delicate falling of the tree’s pale pink flowers. It gave her peace – but not the kind of peace that would forever diminish the agony of her utterly inhumane past.

A grave feeling enveloped her mind. “Oh God why? What did I ever to have deserved that life of hell?” she cursed as thick beads of tears rolled down her bruised sunken cheeks.

Her body began to shiver as the memories devoured her sanity.

It was that one night that completely turned her world upside down. Minu was fast asleep in her room when he came and savagely slit the throats of her mother. The horrifying scream of her dying mother put an eternal end to her comfortable sleep. Her heart stopped, numbing every part of her body. Never once did she imagine that someone so close to her will deliberately make her an unfortunate victim of human trafficking. It was happening – happening so fast that before she could react, the door slammed open. Minu froze in denial as she saw her father smothered with bloody hands and clothes. He inhumanely grabbed her and forcefully stabbed a sedative syringe through the innocent skin of her fragile arms with his last words of ‘Im sorry’. She was gone within a matter of seconds.

Never will she forget the betrayal of the one who taught her how to walk nor the bloody sin she had to commit to escape the brutality of her master. Every joy she held onto was gone. Everything except for the tree that bore pale pink flowers.

She spent days and nights at the Monastery learning ways to diminish the hellish sounds inside her mind – inside her heart. Nothing had seemed to work except the one tree that bore pale pink flowers. Its profound scent and sight was the source of her inner peace as it reminded Minu of her mother who planted the same tree with her psychotic father in their now dead garden.