Comments/Thoughts welcome, grammatical fixes especially welcomed.
Prologue.
8 years ago…
An eight-year old girl by the name of Talia is playing dress-ups with her collection of dolls in her bedroom.
“Walk it, Missy, strut your stuff,” the girl chants softly to her barbie, moving its legs across the floor. “Own that catwalk.”
She is delightedly content in her own world, absolutely absorbed. Little does she expect the horrors the next events will cause her.
A gut-wrenching scream comes from outside her room. The girl immediately drops her doll.
“Mummy?” she climbs to her feet and races to the door. Her heart is in her mouth. The girl is inevitably scared.
A blast of smoke hits her as she opens the door and the poor girl is very confused. She stumbles back blindly, but now the smoke is filling up her room with remarkable speed.
She screams loudly before the smoke invades her lungs. Her breath chokes. She falls to the ground on all fours. Her mind on panic mode, the youngster struggles to find a solution to the sudden chaos, but she does succeed. Stop, drop and crawl: the three-worded message taught to children by teachers to use in case of a fire emergency. Sealing her mouth shut, she bravely crawls out.
Not a second later, a strong arm scoops her up from around the waist, and she is flung on a shoulder. She is hurried back into her room and thrown on her bed.
“Dad, what’s going on? Where’s mum?” Talia coughs to the man, who is scanning the room. He finds a sturdy chair and nods to himself.
“No questions now,” he answers back sharply, and plunges the chair into the full-wall glass window. It shatters under the impact and glass flies everywhere.
“Quickly, Talia!” he calls to his daughter with open arms. She runs to them and he lifts her up. He then scrambles through the smashed opening.
They both land on the grass outside in a heap, coughing loudly.
The western sky facing the burning house is a brilliant orange, with the remains of the blue sky blurring into the darkness. It is a magnificent metaphor for the experiences these two are facing.
“Dad, what happened?” Talia asks. Her question is ignored.
“Listen here,” he says gently, and gets to his feet. He lays his hand on his daughter’s shoulders and looks her clear in the eye.
“I want you to run, okay? Run to Nan’s place, and don’t look back.”
The girl’s bottom lip shakes. “But what about my stuff? What about you and mum?”
“Don’t worry about them. You just sprint your little heart out to grandma and raise the alarm when you get there. Under no circumstance should you come back. Got it?”
“O-okay,” she says, sobbing.
“Now go,” he says, and gives her a little push. She hurries forward, but she cranes her neck around so she can gain one last look at her father.
“Go!” he urges.
There is another scream from inside, and without hesitation the father runs back through the glass opening and into the smoke after his wife.
The girl rushes past down the side of her house and out to the front of the property. She is tempted to look back, but is reminded of her father’s words, and resists it.
She runs out onto the street, struggling a little, but nonetheless covering a lot of distance.
She knows the way, of course. Many times has she walked to her grandma’s house. At a leisurely place, it might take one to reach it in, say, ten minutes. But at the speed of the little girl, and should I mention this child has the swiftness of a cheetah and the emotion of fear fuelling her, it takes half the time.
She runs up the porch steps of the two-storey house and she pounds her fists on the door. Footsteps are heard, and the door opens.
“My goodness Talia, what has happened? Where are your parents?” Her grandma is lowering herself down with the help of the doorframe just to meet the scared granddaughter’s face.
“I have to call the fire fighters! And an ambulance, too! Dad and mum are in our house and it’s on fire!”
The child pushes past her grandmother and hurries to the phone a few metres away. It rests on a carved wooden table.
She picks the receiver up and dials the emergency number.
“Hello? Yes, hurry up! My parents are in my burning house! They’re in Parkway Drive, Hiki! Get there fast!” she yells, and drops the phone back down. It is then her knees collapse underneath her and she falls down, tears streaming down her face.
-x-x-x-
“What a said day, indeed.”
“Mary was a terrific woman, and that Dwayne bloke was a hero. I still can’t believe they died in such a tragic way.”
“That poor girl, imagine what she’d be going through.”
Mutters that float past Talia. She pulls down her black hat to cover her ears and to hide her eyes, which are threatening to overflow with tears.
She clutches two red roses. She waits at the front of the line with people wishing to lay flowers on top of the two coffins.
When a man in a suit she doesn’t know ushers her forward, she does so. Her arm stretches across the coffin and she drops the rose in the centre, and she shuffles over to the other one and does exactly the same.
A shoulder pulls her back. It is her grandmother. She turns and snuggles against her awaiting arms and cries.
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