Come Home Little Girl

Early morning clouds hovered over the mountaintop misting trees and earth and rock. The cool air was thick and briny with a hint of springtime. Rochelle buttoned her sweater and unhooked Toto's leash. The scruffy dog barked and chased after a squirrel.

"Do you really want to play this game? What happens if you catch it?" Toto raced past their usual path down the mountain. Rochelle moaned, "I'm too old for this." To follow him, she had to scramble around boulders, scrub brush and branches slick with dew. The dog leaped down the last few yards to the beach, lifted his quivering nose high and sped off yapping.

"Run squirrel!"

By the time Rochelle reached the shore, Toto was whining and snuffling behind three massive rocks. "What is it, boy?" She hoped it wasn't an injured squirrel or washed up seal carcass. Rochelle stepped around the rock formation and froze; it was worse.

She cried out in horror, stumbled back and fell down five feet away from a child's dead body.

The little girl was perfectly preserved, but Rochelle had a strange, illogical knowing that she'd been dead for a long time. There was something familiar about her, maybe the flowered dress from another era. She leaned closer, staring at the bruises that formed a cruel necklace around the child's skinny neck. Rochelle knew the kind of abuse that left marks like that. Long submerged memories of the games her uncle liked to play surfaced like a shark. She shoved them back under.

Hot and itchy, she lurched up and tore her sweater off, a button flew landing on the lifeless body. "Sorry."

Shattered edges of grief sliced through Rochelle's carefully constructed life. She wiped her face and studied her wet palms; the first tears she'd shed in three decades. She fumbled with her cell phone but couldn't get a signal-she'd have to find one but was loath to leave the child alone.

Rochelle noticed an abalone shell, her favorite as a child, she snatched it up and laid it next to the flaccid body. Frantically searching, she collected more and decorated death. She was already skilled at decorating abuse. She touched the girl's shoulder. "I'm not leaving you, just going up the mountain to call for help."

She turned away but was overwhelmed by a yearning to hold the little girl. Sinking to her knees, she clasped the lifeless body to her chest and rocked back and forth. Time tarried and her body thrummed, liquid heat flowed in melting icebergs of sorrow. She swayed and rocked and dozed for a moment.

Time resumed and Rochelle awakened, wrapped in her own embrace.

She shook off veils of slumber and leaned toward a shallow impression in the sand. "Look, Toto, seashells!" She pressed one to her ear, listening to its' secrets, and gazed across the fathomless ocean to a streaky sunrise sky.

"Come on, boy, race me home." Rochelle skimmed down the shoreline like a child free from woe.