Sticking to Pennies- short story
Apr 22 2008 | Views 241 |
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Tags: jobs parking lots pennies willow club perfect stranger bubble gum rsquo caf
Tags: jobs parking lots pennies willow club perfect stranger bubble gum rsquo caf
“So,” said the voice beside my car as I walked to it in the café parking lot. “You finally came back to me.”
“Huh,” I said, was my car talking to me?
No, but a perfect stranger was in the car.
I should have been scared but I was not. Who could be scared of a little ruddy girl in pink tights, blonde curls spilling around her cheeks, especially when she was smiling up at me, like an old friend?
“How did you get in?” I asked her scrambling to remember if I was babysitting or transporting someone as an errand and had forgotten her in the car.
“Silly, all the doors were locked, but the windows are all open,” she said, “I was always in here.”
She giggled and it was hard for me not to imagine she had not always been there. Blonde hairs of several lengths coated the back of the seat like she had grown up in there.
“Where’s you mum?” I asked.
“Where’s yours?” she said impudently.
“It is not safe for you in a parking lot alone,” I say.
She looks around me in reply and shrugs; her nose barely clears the window.
Out there is only sunken Robbie in a wheelchair with a bucket.
He has bubble gum on the end of a rough willow club and he is picking up pennies at the drive thru window.
“My pennies,” I said to the girl.
She snickered, now her lips clear the window.
“You are just on two sides of a window, you guys are the same,” she laughed.
“I just hope he is not sucking on that gum from time to time.”
“You talk a lot for a little girl. Where’s your mother?”
“Where’s yours, do you know?”
I shook my head. Then I chuckled at her.
“You talk smart for a little girl.”
“I’m smart she said, smarter than you or I will ever be again.”
Robbie spun around on his wheels, he was shaking his head this way and that, acting disabled, stricken.
Nice act I thought as I stared at him.
“So he can see the light,” she says, “you know it flashes hard on the pennies, not so on dollars, huh?”
“You know why I don’t respect him?” I said, “He can walk, sometimes I see him walking and yet he rides around, collecting pennies.”
“Then its no wonder pennies stick to him,” she says making a chewing motion in her mouth, then blowing a big bubble. “I know someone else who does that.”
I turned to key my car open, I had another parking lot to get to, I had just quit from one lot, I needed the other. When I looked back she was leaving and as I entered one door she left it from another.
“Wait! Come back, I like talking to you,” I said.
“I don’t need to come back,” said the girl, “I was always there.”
© milirao., all rights reserved.
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