The Hope Collection

Her New Kingdom(unedited)

            I woke the next morning to a loud noise coming from the bar below. It sounded like broken glass and yelling. I stayed in the comfy cotton bed as I listened to the sounds. I heard a crash then a girl's sobbing. It was all I could do to stay in bed and not sprint downstairs to see what was going on. The slam of the tavern door signalled the end of whatever had happened downstairs. I got up and took a shower. The warm water and clean smell of the soap cleared up my senses and awoke me the rest of the way. Maybe I had just imagined what had happened downstairs, I was still half asleep.

            I washed my dress in the bathtub and scrubbed it clean with the hand soap from the sink. I squeezed the dress with a dry bath towel and put it on. It was wrinkled and still had dirt smudges on it, but it wasn't anything I haven't dealt with before. I made my way downstairs where people were sitting at booths eating plates of pancakes, sausages, and eggs. It all looked so normal compared to what I had just heard half an hour ago. There was no broken chunks of glass on the wooden tavern floor. No sobbing girl stood in the middle of the room. The door was intact and none of the men looked angry.

            "Hello, miss, would you like some breakfast? Since you stayed the night you may have breakfast for free this fine morning, along with lunch this afternoon," the kind bartender from last night said.

            I nodded and took a plate of pancakes and poured a bit of maple syrup over the two piled up pancakes. A dollop of creamy butter made the pancakes look like something you would see on television. After getting a giant glass of freshly squeezed orange juice from the orange grove outside of town I sat down at a corner booth alone. The dark green cushioned booth was a reminder of what kingdom's tavern I was sitting in.

            A young woman walked by, she had on the waitress uniform for the tavern. One of her cheeks were a little darker than the other, like she had put her make-up on unevenly. Her face showed little expression, other than the way she held her head. She always watched the ground, and when she bumped into someone she would utter an apology and run off to tend to one of the tables calling for a waitress. I watched her with curiousity. She seemed so afraid of something, but what was the question.

            She ran from table to table serving drinks, breakfasts, and even napkins and eating utensils. She just didn't seem to care what she was doing, all that mattered was that the customers were happy. She still seemed sad though. Nothing seemed to make her happy for excited. She never smiled once and she only spoke when she asked what someone wanted. She was like me, in the beginning, when I began to take care of my parents' store after they died. I was still in school, so I had to hire someone to work the shop while I was at school.

            For a while it was like nothing mattered but keeping the store going. Most of the time I would give up precious study time to wait on a customer. Most customers would look at me in disgust when they would ask for my boss and I would tell them that I ran the store. Some, and I lived for these people, would smile and sometimes even congratulate me for being able to keep up with my schoolwork and keep a store going. No one asked about my story, why I was running a store with no one else older to help me but the one person I payed part time to, they all thought I was simply thrown out by my parents and I was trying to fund for myself. No one knew my parents that been killed by a murderer.

            I watched the girl run around for a while as I ate slowly. The girl's cheek had begun to change colors. It was no longer but a bright pink as if she had put on too much blush. It was turning a dark purple shade. Her cheek was bruised. She must have been the girl was hit and was sobbing. The person that hit her probably had been the person who stormed out of the tavern slamming the wooden door behind him. The girl didn't even appear to be hurt, she simply went about her job.