Pink as Roses

Dictionary Pages

Elania opened her favorite book.

She squinted her eyes as she stared down at the millions of small text lining the pages in perfectly neat rows. She had read this book many times, about 21 to be exact, and after a long day of staying inside and ducking away at the lone cars running down the road about a few hours apart, she was ready to read it again.

The pages were very fragile, leaf-like in the way she could feel her finger tips on either side of them. She moved her fingers against the page in a rhythmic fashion, creating a gentle fluttering noise as her fingers made contact with the page.

It was a bad habit of hers, and her Mom would scorn her for it. "Why can't you read quietly?" she would always ask, and Elania didn't really have an answer. The rhythmic, steady pulses of her fingers against the page just made the whole process seem lighter and more free, the gentle scrapings of her nails against the thin pages made the whole process seem more calming.

She started from the beginning, like all readers should, and never looked at the end, even though she knew almost every word from the start to the finish. And although she knew that her choice of book was quite different from what most people would prefer as reading material, she thoroughly enjoyed it, every word, every sentence, every dot.

"Are you reading that thing again?" asked a high-pitched voice from the staircase. Elania glanced up and saw Reyna, her younger sister staring at her through the poles of the staircase, like she was some unnatural zoo animal to goggle at because of her "strange" reading material.

Elania sighed and took a note of the page number she was on, (she was always stopped near the same place as her sister had a scheduled time in which she liked to clomp down the staircase to wait for dinner to be set up.) and closed the large red book, longingly tracing the golden text on the spine like she always did before slowly sliding it back into its spot on the small bookcase.

It was always satisfying, to see the book slide in just right onto the shelf, perfectly filling up the empty hole that was there.

"The Merriam-Webster Dictionary," Reyna said slowly, reading the spine, her head tilted sideways, in an overly-obnoxious voice. Elania sighed inwardly at her sister, who always managed to find a way to 'disturb the peace', as her Mom called it. 

Reyna cocked her head at her. "What's it about?"

"Well, it's a collection of all the words in the English language, all the way from A to Z, and has labeled definitions, syllables and-"

"B-ORING," Reyna shouted in her face, causing Elania to jerk back in shock from the sudden noise. "Who wants to read about words anyways? I mean, we all know what words are." Then, Reyna froze up and slowly turned towards Elania, concerned look on her face. "You do know what words are, right?"

"Yes, I do Rey Rey," Elania said, exasperated. "I'm pretty sure most people do."

Just before Reyna was about to retort, they heard a rhythmic knocking on the back door. Reyna quieted as Elania listened carefully to the combination.

Knock. Pause. Knock, Knock. Short Pause. Knock. Short Pause. Knock.

Elania sighed from relief, just like she did every day, and Reyna's tense form, which was way more tense than any six year old should ever have to be, relaxed.

"Coming Mom!"

Elania rushed towards the door so her mom wouldn't need to dilly-dally on the doorstep, even if it was the back one, for longer than needed. Reyna hurriedly began to clear a side table for their mother to place her possessions on.