A Collection of Short Stories and Poems

Freckles

~ The next few entries are from free writes I was supposed to complete for 90 days straight without missing a day in order to get extra credit. There's no real reason for them besides me trying to type over 365 words with whatever I wanted, which was the requirement. Enjoy.~

Little Stars. That's what my father used to call me. The dots that smothered the redness of my cheeks and intensified the blushing of my ginger were nothing special: they were simply brown dots of discolouration. But, God, did he love my dots, so much so that he named me Dotty without a second thought. However, it's the name "Little Stars" that stuck around for me. I loved the feeling the name brought to my heart, the warmth and the love it filled my chest with. Every time his deep, protective voice called me that name I felt special: no one else was a Little Star. No, not like I was. I was the little star and he was my father.

I never knew my mother and, despite our closeness to one another, he never wanted to acknowledge she'd ever existed. It drew to a point in which I believed I'd been born from an odd concoction made by some wizard somewhere, conjured up by the use of stardust and a bubbling purple cauldron. An odd thought, perhaps, but Father really seemed to tense at the mention of mothers and my connection was that was because I never had one and it was a secret he tried to keep hidden from everyone. Even me.

Regardless, I loved him and he loved me. He was my Big Star. My freckles and flaming locks of hair only seemed to match him too perfectly. We completed each other: I was a star shard, a shard of my beautiful father and not my mother, who only seemed to distress my pretty protector star. Little and Big Stars were hard to keep together. Everyone and everything tried so hard to tear us apart, even a woman I've never met was able to create a large crevis between us just because she was once my mother. I don't think that was very fair of him, to scold me for having the curiosity that obviously meant the world to him -- so much so that he created a child he would later call his precious Little Star. Who was this woman? What was this woman? Why did she mean more to my Big star than I did to him? Me, his precious little star? What did I do wrong?