Excerpt: Imagining Life

The Rowe’s never depended much on anyone or anything. They lived in the squalor of their own fortunes, and it was never very much. For food, it had always appeared miraculously at the broken, second-rate table for dinner at the very last minute. As for the snacks and the drinks, they got these in the nearby forested area near their dainty, little cottage out in the nowhere’d abyss. The cottage itself was built of unsteady hands, with the stones stack precariously on top of the other until the formed the small formation of what appeared to be the shape of a home. The cottage was built to an uneven two stories where windows dangerously clung to the edges of the walls. Even the animals in the surrounding area dared not enter such a home of unease.

Although it could only be said that the home’s insides were not that much improved. The insides were just as jumbled and strewn together with clothes, maps, plates and cups scattered across the room. The people that resided in this cottage were just has awfully misshapen. Or at least, their personalities existed that way. The man of house was a decent looking man enough that he never did bring a sore sight to anyone he worked with. He appeared a good, kind man to those who worked at his side, but back home, that was where he felt the most comfortable, real. His lying nature could be said to have started in his early childhood when his mother left his father one lone evening, and never returned to greet his smallish figure again. The traumatic event was enough to scar him into doing some unforgivable things. But mostly, he kept those desires under wraps with the help of someone equally scarred to the point of destruction as he. His wife, as outwardly loving and caring as she was to her so called friends, possessed a much darker past than she cared to admit to anyone but her husband. She remembered the days of darkness when she played witness to her parents deaths. Her personality was one where she would aid her husband of death to their fancies of nightmarish delight.

However, between the two self-destructive parents, it was only by a chance of happenings that they had a child of blinding and pure whiteness. And like ink in water, their corrupted hatred spread and darkened her soul. The situation would have been far worse, mind, if not for the help of her friends. Her friends at the nearby school insisted that what she had could only be labeled as imaginary friends. They had them too. But unlike her, they one had imaginary friend they talked to. She had about three who she saw on a daily basis, others passed by when they felt like it. Her real friends were jealous that she had so many. Too jealous. These real friends of her left her out during school lunches where they all had something to eat packed in a little, brown bag from their loving mothers and fathers. She, on the other hand, rarely had food from her parents because for all they were, were not quite as loving as the other parents of the kids from the school. So, this young child sat, presumably, by herself off a little ways from the other children picking at the daisies in the yard, or just eating her lunch when her parents bothered enough to remember she existed and make her something to eat. It was usually just an apple or a slice of bread. But anything that could come in a little, brown bag was far better than nothing at all.