The toddler stared hard at the thing in front of her playpen. Her almond eyes blinked every few seconds as her three-year-old brain made perfect sense of what she was seeing. She gazed through a beam of sunlight and she stood on her tippy toes; stretching out her hand through a pillar of light filled with hundreds of thousands of tiny white flecks drifting and churning in the warm air of the small Vancouver house.
Just beyond the sunbeam, no more than a few arm's lengths away, stood the thing she was looking at: another little grill dressed in a frilly cotton jumper with a torn sleeve. She clutched a battered Teddy bear tightly in her right hand and she was shoeless. Dark red scabs and scrapes covered her feet, and the little girl's toes were black; as if someone hand coloured them in with a thick black crayon. The thing's lifeless didn't blink, not that it mattered much to the toddler in the playpen because she had seen this one before. A thick, pasty smear of redness clung to its scalp – it was so red, the toddler thought it might have been finger paint, which didn't make any sense at all. Why would a little girl smear red finger paint on the side of her head? That was an open invitation to a spanking from an angry mommy.
The toddler remembered a picnic on weeks earlier because it was the first time she'd ever seen the thing now standing no more than a few feet way in the living room of her house. She remembered the sting of her mother's hand on her bum after saying hello four times to something that her mother and father couldn't see. But the toddler didn't cry when her mother smacked her bottom. She just stared in wonder at the little girl in the torn jumper and that only seemed to make her mother even angrier.
And the thing continued to visit the toddler. Once in a while it was almost see–through, like one of the nighties her mommy wore to bed during those bedtimes when she listened to the sound of her mother moaning and calling out to God in Cantonese. Other times the thing flickered like static on the TV when thunder and lightning and rain battered the house so much the floors would shake. This time, it was just as any other little girl and to the toddler in the playpen, it simply made sense to want to play with her. Maybe they could both make something pretty with the finger paints.
"Mommy!" the toddler called out. "I want to play with my friend!"
The thing in the frilly jumper just stood there and the toddler noticed for the first time that it wasn't actually standing on the ground – it was floating.
Maybe, the toddler thought, she could learn how to float too.
They could float together – all through the house, or maybe even outside at the playground across the street.
"Mommy!" she shouted again, this time a little louder. The toddler really wanted out of her playpen. Loud thumping filled the air as the toddler's mother stomped down the hallway from the kitchen.
"Jia Song, there is no shouting in this house unless it comes from me!" the toddler's mother barked. "It's not time for your show yet and I am making noodles. Play quietly!"
The toddler began hopping on both feet as she pointed through the sunbeam. "I want to play with her!" she shouted back. "I want to finger paint with my friend!"
The toddler's mother scowled. "There is nobody in this room to play with and my daughter will not have invisible friends. If you cannot see it, then it isn't real."
This only made the toddler hop on both feet a little harder. She scowled back at her mother and shouted, "She's right here, mama! She's wearing a jumper and she has a Teddy bear. But her toes are black. Why are her toes black, mama?"
The mother leaned into the playpen and gave the toddler a swat on the bum. "There is nobody in this room except your mother and you, Jia. Stop telling lies."
The toddler didn't cry out. Instead, a flash of anger rippled across her face and she said, "She is floating, mama. She can show me how to float. Listen, mama ... listen! She can float!"
The mother didn't swat her daughter this time. She turned around to look at whatever her child was looking at and all that she was a wall along with a small bookshelf filled with picture books. The temperature in the room suddenly dropped as a shiver crept across the back of her neck.
A flash of light – like a camera flash. It was then she saw it – for the briefest of moments. Less time that it took to blink: the mother caught a glimpse of a little girl with a gaping wound on the side of her head. A smear of blood and a misshapen skull; dented by a hard object like a hammer.
The mother spun around and gazed down angrily at her daughter who smiled at the place where she'd seen ... something.
"It's just my mommy," the toddler said to whatever she was looking at. "Where is your mommy? Does she spank your bum hard too?"
"There is nothing to talk with, Jia!" the mother snapped. "Stop talking to shadows."
"But she's right there, mama! Can't you see her! She has red finger paint on her head and I won't get any on me. I want to play!"
The mother thrust her arms into the playpen and snatched the toddler up, digging her fingernails into the child's armpits. But the toddler didn't cry out. She just kept on smiling at her new friend. She smiled right past her mother's fiery glare and that only made her mother angrier.
"Stop talking, Jia!" she hissed as she shook her daughter. "Whatever you saw isn't real and you will not talk to things that I cannot see!"
The toddler's smile dissolved as she cocked her head up to look into her mother's eyes. She opened her mouth and the voice that came out wasn't a little child's voice at all.
"This one is an emissary. This one will speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves."
The toddler slipped out of her mother's grasp and fell to the floor. She scuttled across the carpet to where her friend stood only to see the little girl in the frilly jumper fade away. And the toddler started to cry.
"Why, mama!" she wailed. "Why did you scare her away!"
The mother didn't bother to answer her angry child. She raced out of the room desperate to distance herself from her only child. A door at the end of the hallway slammed tight as the toddler sat down on the carpet where the little girl had once been. She turned to look at her Cookie Monster chalk board. The magnetic alphabet letters slid across the green slate forming word.
D-A-R-K-N-E-S-S
And the little girl smiled as she blotted out the sound of her mother wailing from the room down the hall.
YOU ARE READING
#GRUDGEGIRL
ParanormalMeet Jia Song. She kills the killers. At twenty one, she should be finishing university and entering a profession. That was her parent's plan for her life. That's how everything was supposed to be. Unfortunately nobody asked Jia what she wanted to d...
