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The girl walked through the forest path, her bare feet pricking with the little stones and sticks that came to fall in her path. Barely at the age of twelve, her green eyes looking through the forest, she heard the birds in her path chirp, speaking to each other where she didn’t understand.
She continued to walk back to her home. Her hands could barely hold all the logs of wood in her hand and she had to be careful. The clouds of the Bonelake appeared to hover up in the sky, dark and brooding.
Entering the village which had been for years that she could remember, she made her way back towards her house. Her eyes and head looked down without meeting anyone’s eyes as she passed houses and alleys. She had to walk and cross two more paths of houses when some from behind pushed her. The logs that she had been carrying carefully scattered in front of her on the ground and in the process she felt down. Her hands scraping the ground where she felt the burn.
She gulped. She had been quiet this time, without causing any trouble of talking to people who belonged to this village. Her eyes darted left and right, slowly reaching out to take hold of the woods in her hands when the person who had pushed her before pushed her again for her head to almost hit the surface of the ground.
“Where do you think you are going, taking the woods from our forest?” It was a man who was in his early twenties who stood behind her with his hands in his pocket and a thin piece of wood in his mouth which he shifted back and forth, biting on to it.
“I don’t think she understood the last time we gave her a lesson,” another young man spoke who stood next to him. His face holding a light dusted amount of scruff around his jaw.
The girl turned around to look at the men who stood tall behind her. Towering over her, waiting for her to carry the logs of wood so that they could only push her all over again and laugh at her. The little girl remembered the last time she felt the pain in her body.
Were they going to hurt her again? She didn’t know why the two people wanted to hurt her when she had done nothing wrong.
“What? Did you lose the ability to speak?”
“It would do us good if that happened,” said the first one that had both of them laugh over it.
“The woods are from the other forest,” she answered them for one of the men to stop smiling.
“That’s right. Don’t ever think of cutting the trees around here. It doesn’t look like she has any dead animals with her,” said the same man and both of the a.d.u.l.ts walked away from her after enjoying the little scare they gave the little girl.
She started to pick up the logs of scattered wood, one after another in her small arms as people walked past her without stopping by to her or ask if she was alright. She was an outcast to them. Just as she continued to pick the last two blocks of wood which would help in heating the house in this cold weather, she caught sight of a young girl of her own age looking at her.
With both the young girls’ eyes meeting, young Penny smiled at the girl. A smile that was filled with innocence but the smile was never returned. The other girl hid behind her mother where her mother glared at Penny. The woman’s eyes hateful as she looked at her before she said something to her daughter that had the other girl turn her head away and look elsewhere.
Penny felt the little prick in her heart. People ignoring her so blatantly, hurting her with hurtful words and not treating her like others hurt more than the thorns she stepped on to. She didn’t understand why people treated her the way they did, never talking to her, not looking at her. Once she had picked all of them, she headed back to her home.
Her mother appeared to be cooking something in the pot as she stepped inside the little house of theirs. The girl wanting to peek and see what her mother was cooking for the coming meal placed the woods on the ground in the corner.
Walking towards her mother, she stepped closer when her mother suddenly gasped as if she weren’t expecting her to come home so soon.
“What are you doing here?” the woman asked before putting a lid on top of the vessel which had a black liquid boiling in it. The little girl who caught it along with the pungent smell, she frowned.
Her eyes looking up at her mother when the woman blocked her view from what was boiling behind her, “I brought the wood,” the girl spoke cheerfully, “What are you cooking, mama?” she asked her mother.
“Nothing, go get the water. We are running out of water,” the woman attempted to shoo the girl away but the curious girl continued to hover around wanting to see what her mother was cooking that had turned bad. Maybe it only smelt bad but was actually good in the mouth, thought the young girl to herself.
“But I am hungry,” she said with knitted brows. She hadn’t eatenher breakfast well in the morning as they didn’t have sufficient food but now that her mother was cooking she wished to eat. Just as she tried to reach the vessel by walking around her mother, she was suddenly pulled and thrown across the room with her body crashing against the wall.
The girl looked up at her mother in fear, “Mama?”
The woman appeared to look furious at her, “How many times do I have to tell you to stay away from the pot but you keep hindering my work? Every single time!” the girl looked confused. Her mother was never angry, she was a kind woman. But what the little girl was unaware of was that her mother tried to erase her memories…
