Daddy's Girl

• Georgia Farmer, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2016

A pale light filters through the window, spreading broken silhouettes onto the small figure huddled beneath the window ledge.

A fragile hand clutches a crayon, which is moving frivolously across a notepad balancing precariously on cross-legged knees. Concentration etches across the young girl's brow, and she frowns as a rebellious curl falls onto her fore head and obscures her vision. She blows at the piece of hair through the side of her mouth and returns to her work, her lips puckering as the irritating ringlet settles back against her forehead. 

The little girl looks up from her work and out the window, to find a man opening a door to a young boy with a wide smile, who then envelopes his father’s right leg into a tight bear hug. He laughs and pats the boy’s head affectionately.
Tears fill the girl’s eyes and she snaps her head back to her drawing as the pain in her heart returns with an overwhelming force. 

She still remembers every detail of her own Daddy. His hugs, his laugh, the way his eyes danced when he smiled, the pride in his face when she drew him a picture. His voice when he sang her lullabies when she couldn't sleep. Everything. 
The girl slaps her thigh angrily. She hates that she loved him so much. She wishes she had hated him, that way maybe it wouldn't hurt so much. Her Papa had made her a promise and he broke it. She didn't know if she could ever forgive him.

She mumbles under her breath angrily as she surveys her work. The picture is of three happy, smiling stick figures holding hands in the middle of a park. On the left is a very tall stick man with curly brown hair and eyes the colour of emerald. The daddy. On the right, a slightly shorter stick woman with long, straight blonde hair and ocean blue eyes. The mummy. And in the middle, a very small stick girl with her Papa's hair and her Mama's eyes. 

With an anguished scream the little girl scrunches up the piece of paper and hurls it across the room. She throws herself onto the ground and screams again and again, pounding at the ground with her fists, finally letting the sea of grief consume her fully.

The click of a door sounds and arms scoop her thrashing body up from the ground. Gathering the material of a shirt into her fist, the girl leans into the embrace and cries, sobs racking her small body.

"Why, why, why, why?" the little girl repeats over and over again, her heart breaking a little bit more with each word. 

A tear falls from her Mama's eyes, and the girl feels her mother's arms tighten around her quaking body.

"I don't know, baby, I don't know why. But you know this, even though he can't be here, he loves you with all of his heart."

And in that second, the little girl truly believed it.