Ella

        The babysitter had left a half an hour ago, leaving Ella alone until her parents got home from work, which in fact should have been any minute. The babysitter's parting words were,

        "Tell your mother that my mother took a special trip."

        Little Ella was sitting alone in the living room with three blank sheets of paper and sixteen different, heavily used coloured crayons. She looked over at the the desk in the office in the next room. There were blue, red and black Sharpies on the desk. Even for a four year old, Ella had a knack for leaving something behind to remember her, so she shakily got up, slowly walked over to the desk and grabbed all three Aharpies. Up on the computer was a page filled with sprawling letters and meaningless words that didn’t make any sense to Ella. She just reached up and grabbed the markers, then waddled slowly back to the living room with the three empty sheets of paper.

           Once seated back at her couch, she uncapped the red Sharpie and attempted to draw a backpack. When it was completed, Ella looked down at the red lines that didn’t look anything like the backpack she was intending to draw. Bored, Ella flipped the paper over and began to draw things that backpacks were used for, since she couldn’t read or write yet. Another year and she’d be in kindergarten.

           First, Ella tried to draw a little girl running through the woods. She tilted her head and frowned at it, then drew a yellow school bus with smiling stick figures in the windows. One girl had blue hair that spiked up as if it had gel in it, someone else had yellow hair the flew out the windows and through some stick trees. Ella placed a chubby little fist on the coffee table and moved one paper aside. When she looked down at the table again, she noticed some sharpie marks that bled through the paper. She blew out a little frustrated sigh, then waddled slowly over to the closet where her father’s hunting backpack resided in the spring. When she unzipped it open, Ella saw a gigantic blue water bottle bigger than her face, three rough wool blankets, a box of thin sticks with a rough side on the box, a heavy flashlight, and a slippery green tent.

        Ella zipped up the bag and dragged it out of the closet, absentmindedly leaving the light on. She waddled towards the food cabinet and took the Girl Scout Thin Mints, Tostitos, Cheetos, her cherry popsicles and the hefty bottle of seltzer that fizzed into an explosion when she dropped it on the floor, soaking her socks and making her wail for her mother. After leaving the refrigerator door open and the seltzer popping on the floor, she dragged the backpack behind her out the door, her wet socks giving her feet freezer burn on the cold wood deck.

        After a few minutes of this slow trotting through the woods, Ella stopped, rested the backpack on a rotted tree stump and pulled out the huge green wool blanket to wrap around her shoulders. Only then did it occur to the little girl alone in the middle of the woods that maybe she should have brought shoes. There was a reason why she might have forgotten to wear them, though. Since Ella was four years old, she didn’t know how to put her own shoes on without help. At her daycare center, she saw all sorts of little girls Velcroing their shoes to their feet, while she had to sit on the ugly blue cot and wait for her mother to come pick her up. But Miss Caroline never told her off or taught her how to put her shoes on.  After thinking like this for a few minutes, Ella zipped up the backpack, pulled the blanket tighter around her little shoulders and set off for wherever she was going.

        The sun dipped lower and behind the trees as Ella chased after squirrels and sat down to eat a few chips, the gigantic backpack always looming behind her like the thought of her parents. The last time Ella looked down at her feet before she met the edge of the woods, they were starting to fade into a slow purple-y sort of color. But she didn’t really know what that meant, so she just walked on, each leaf sending a tremor of cold up her leg and back down her neck.

        The woods seemed to go on forever, tree after tree after tree, the darkness lying on top of the canopy like the wool blankets that roughed up her arms as her bare feet walked on. At one point, Ella sat down on a rock and wailed, tears welling up in her eyes. She wanted her mother and her smooth fingers to place slippers on her icy feet. She wanted her father to sneak her little candies after dinner and read her to sleep. But if Ella turned around, then she wouldn’t know which way to go to get back to the warm comfort of the heated house. So she trod on through the forest.

        The trees began to thin after a while, now the sun was almost completely set. An orange glow still cast itself on the edge of the woods as Ella dragged the backpack on to the pavement of what looked like a well used road. No cars were on it now, but the pavement was warm, and Ella sighed when she stepped on it. After standing there for a few minutes, barely thawing out her feet, she slowly waddled into the little shack on the side of the road. A bright neon sign above the little place read ‘Jim’s Finest Candy Shop’. There were two SUVs parked in the little gravel lot, so Ella danced around on her freezing toes to keep from hurting her feet, the backpack bouncing behind her like a happy-go-lucky horse.

        The door let out a little ding noise when she walked in. The whole place was filled with shelves, almost like a bookstore, except they weren’t floor to ceiling. The shelves had gigantic jars of candy in them, Swedish Fish, gummy sharks, gummy watermelons, chocolates, shinily wrapped Cadbury chocolates, all the like. Ella took a few steps into the store, and a well-rounded; man turned the corner of one of the shelves and took a little step back at the sight of her.

        “Well, little girly, how may I help you?” the man asked, his soft voice kind. Ella looked up into the pale blue eyes and at the greying hair of his face. Then a little twist appeared on the face. “Where are your parents?”

        “My mommy and daddy work a lot,” she says quietly, her eyes at her feet.

        “Well, if you need something, then just let me know,” he responds, his aging eyes twinkling. She just walked away and down the aisle after looking at the man glancing down at the other end of the shop. When Ella rounded the corner of one of the shelves and saw a man in a grey suit not unlike her father’s. Next to him was a woman with blonde hair exactly like her mother’s.

        The man turned and walked away from the spot while Ella just stood there looking at the woman in her mother’s business suit. She let the rest of the backpack drop with a strange noise, and the woman quickly turned around, as if scared for her life. The woman’s green eyes, just like her mother’s, widened at the sight of the little girl, barefoot with a hunting backpack in an almost out of business candy shop.

        “Ella?” her mother asked.