Goldie followed her mom down the stairs toward the dining room with reluctant steps.
"Honey," her mom whispered in her dangerous voice. "Stop dragging your feet."
The dangerous voice - low and quiet, but scary. It meant that things were going to go down if Goldie didn't stop daydreaming and pay attention to what Mom was saying. Once, Mom even took her books away as a punishment when she took too long to get up and clean her room after Mom had used her dangerous voice.
It was hard to listen when she was so involved in the stories. Goldie always picked the thickest books. She'd been reading since she was three years old. She didn't care about pictures, she had an imagination after all.
Maybe Mom doesn't have an imagination.
No, she must. Sometimes Goldie and Mom would build a fort out of the kitchen table and chairs. They'd cover them with blankets and usually make at least two rooms. One of them was the main room and then the other one would be a jail or a bathroom or a bedroom. Sometimes they'd pretend they were Princesses in a castle and there was a bad guy trying to kidnap them. But Mom and Goldie always won against the bad people. So, yes. Mom must have an imagination. Plus, Mom likes to read.
Goldie straightened her back and marched into the dining room. Mom moved toward the long table where to Goldie it seemed like hundreds of people were sitting. It was actually only twenty other people. Twenty scary people.
Goldie leaned against her mother's side as she walked, now. She tried not to look at the relatives as she sat down. They were all talking to Mom. Jumbled sentences like, "Charlene, how did you get her clean so fast? Did you toss her in a feeding troth?" and "When I was a kid, I don't think I was quite as well behaved as Golda, Charlene." Golda was Goldie's given name but no one called her that. Well, almost no one. Obviously the lady across the table with the long purple claws didn't know that.
A man sat down beside Goldie and poured himself a mug of liquid from a brown glass bottle he had brought with him to the table. He leaned over to Goldie and offered the bottle to her. He chuckled and made sure to catch Mom's eye before he said, "You want some?"
"Charles! Don't even joke about that." Mom clicked her tongue at him.
Charles shrugged his shoulders and placed the bottle beside his mug on the table, still grinning slightly.
He's Mom's brother, Goldie was pretty sure. Mom talked about Uncle Charlie sometimes when they were at home. She said when she and Uncle Charlie were kids, they rode horses and had two puppies, each. Goldie didn't have any puppies. She wasn't sure she wanted a pet. Well, she kind of did. A monkey would be a better sort of pet for her, she had decided. Mom said that monkeys were too hard to take care of, so Goldie couldn't have one.
Mom put food on Goldie's plate as dishes were passed around the table. Uncle Charlie poured some red juice into Goldie's cup. Mom didn't tell him 'no' this time, so Goldie took a little sip to see what it was. It had smelled like Kool-Aid when she put the cup up to her mouth, but her face contorted at the sour taste and she quickly swallowed the vile muck. It was then that she realized that she had just drank poison. Sometimes there's poison that has peculiar taste, but it has no scent, she had read that somewhere. Her juice was definitely poisoned. She put her red plastic cup back up beside her full plate of food. She let her hands hang on either side of her chair and leaned back, she closed her eyes and waited for the horrible stomach cramps that she knew were going to start at any moment.
She waited.
When they didn't start, she opened one squinty little eye and looked around the room. Mom jabbed her with her elbow.
"Eat your food," she said, then turned away to talk to a woman in the chair on the opposite side of her.
Goldie opened her eyes all of the way and leaned back toward her plate. She looked at the food. What if it were poisoned? How would she know?
She patted her mom on the shoulder.
"Mom. Um, Mom?" She said, continuing to pat.
Mom was waving her hand in the air as she talked. The hand was holding a fork. She held up one finger in a 'just a moment' gesture and her finger and the fork made a 'V.'
She turned to Goldie, "What?"
"Mom," Goldie said, looking at her hands.
"What, Goldie?" Mom said, again.
"Mom, I was just wondering what this is," Goldie said, pointing at the red plastic cup, not bothering to lift her eyes to the table.
"It's juice."
"Mom," she whispered, looking up at her. "I think it's poisoned."
"No, it's not poisoned. What Uncle Charlie is drinking is poison juice."
The whole table exploded in a roar of laughter, but Goldie didn't know why, it was a serious matter. By the time the laughter, especially Uncle Charlie's, had finished echoing in Goldie's ears, Mom had turned back to her previous conversation. Goldie patted her again, still suspecting the worst of her juice.
Mom paused her conversation again and looked at Goldie.
Goldie picked up her cup and held it out to her mom, "Will you please taste it?"
Mom sighed and rolled her eyes, but took Goldie's cup and drank some. Her face contorted in the same way Goldie's had, which confirmed her suspicions. Goldie nodded her head and pressed her lips together when her Mom's wide eyes met hers. Mom swallowed quickly and leaned across the table toward the woman with the purple talons.
"Aunt Till," she called across the table, then waited for the lady to quit talking to some man with a hat. When she looked over, Mom pointed at Goldie's cup with her fork. "Did you put sugar in the Kool-Aid, Auntie?"
"Oh. No. I just assumed it was already in there, like the tea powder I pour into my water bottles," the purple talons touched Aunt Till's face and Goldie worried that she'd injure herself. "Kool-Aid juice isn't like that?" She asked, wide-eyed.
"No," said Mom, shaking her head slowly from side to side. Her jaw muscles were moving and her lips were tight. Goldie could tell she was trying not to laugh.
"I'm sorry, honey," Aunt Till said to Goldie.
Goldie thought that Aunt Till's glasses made her look like an owl.
"It's OK," said Mom, "I'll fix it up."
Mom took Goldie's red cup and the pitcher of juice and walked into the kitchen.
Goldie tried her food. Some of it was gross, like the salad with the noodles and slimy peas, but she liked the yellow rice and the chicken and the lemon pudding that had whipped cream on top. She also had some green salad that Mom had put ranch dressing on top. She dipped her french fries in her salad dressing. French fries were best that way. Ketchup just made the fries look gross. She didn't like ketchup. It looked like blood.
Mom was like a healing angel because when she brought the juice back, it wasn't poison anymore. She probably just touched the juice with her magical fork wand and healed it from being poisonous. Goldie drank the whole glass of it, and then another before she was done with her food.
After dinner, Goldie checked for the cat on the back porch. It was dark out and Mom didn't want her to go too far, so she couldn't check under the house again. The cat wasn't on the porch and wasn't anywhere within the safe area where the porch light shone... shined?
Goldie sighed and closed the back screen and then shut the door with her foot. She skipped through the kitchen, which was surprisingly empty now that dinner was over, and up into the bedroom to get the book she'd been reading since she'd been at her Aunt Mary's house. She hopped up onto the big fluffy bed where she and Mom had been sleeping and felt around under the pillows.
"I was sure I put that book under my pillow," she said.
She sat down and dangled her feet off the edge of the bed. She tapped her chin with her finger as she scanned the room. The circle rug on the floor was made of braided fabric. It was lying flat, so it couldn't have hid under there. Goldie never ventured under the bed, especially in other people's houses, because she knew that was where the monsters lived. What about in the window? She hopped off of the bed and her feet hit the shiny wood floor with a thud. She traveled across the circle rug to the window with the lacy white drapes. She felt the ledge with her hand without moving the drapes away from the window. Nothing. With her hand still on the sill, she looked up at the ceiling. There was a chandelier thingy hanging down above the bed. It was kind of scary because it had a dagger hanging down in the center of it. She forgot about it when the lights were off at night but she made sure never to walk under it while she was in the room, in case it fell.
She looked up at the bookshelf, at the open slot where she'd gotten the book from, but the book wasn't there. Higher up on the shelf, she saw a book lying on its side. She skipped over to the ornate quilted chair beside the bookshelf and jumped up on it. A little poof of dust loomed up around her feet from the chair. She stood on her tip toes to reach the book but her fingers weren't quite long enough. Maybe if she jumped she could reach high enough. She positioned herself on the chair so she could jump off and still reach the book shelf and lept up into the air. Her hands flew out and it was almost like she was flying. She touched the book and pulled it forward till it was on the brink of falling, but gravity caught hold of her before the book fell. She hopped back up on the quilted chair and created another plume of dust with her feet. She jumped again and this time caught hold of the book in her hand and brought it down with her. She landed on the floor like a magnificent gymnast finishing an amazing set of backflips. She could here the roar of the crowd as she held the book up in the air like a trophy. She looked at the cover and then hugged the book tightly against her chest. Peter Pan. Just the book she was looking for.
She tucked the book under her arm and skipped down the stairs to the living room. Most of the relatives had gone home because they actually lived nearby and had only come over for after the funeral to eat food and visit. So, it was just Mom sitting in the living room when Goldie arrived. She snuggled up beside her mom and opened her book to the page she'd bent the corner on the keep her place.
Next time she looked up from her book, her mom had slipped out of the room and left her book lying upside down on the couch. Goldie put Peter Pan down beside her on the couch and picked up Mom's book. She put her finger against the page where Mom had been reading and looked at the front cover. "Great Expectations" was what it was called. She opened the book up to the the page where Mom had been reading and started reading. Mom had said that the guy who wrote her book also wrote a book about Christmas, so it sounded like it might be an interesting book. This page was about an really old lady who was wearing a wedding dress. There was moldy food and spider webs and the old lady somehow lit her dress on fire and she was running around the room or something and lighting everything else on fire. When Goldie picture all of it in her head, she didn't really like how it looked. Great Expectations was a scary book and nothing like Christmas. She put the book back down, lying open on the couch, and went back to reading Peter Pan, the book about the kid who could fly. The kid who never grew up. That sounded kind of like the perfect life to Goldie. She thought if she could fly, she might be able to go outside and find Cat and take Cat on an adventure through the sky.
When she went to bed that night, Goldie had a nightmare about a woman with bright white hair and long, sharp, purple talons who flew around Goldie's bedroom and talked about Neverland. The old woman's hair was actually made from horrible, sticky spiderwebs. The woman suddenly burst into flames and started flying frantically around the room, screaming and wailing as she lit the bedroom on fire.
And Goldie screamed.
The next morning, Goldie woke up chilled. She noticed blue light coming from her bedroom window. She wrapped her arms around herself and walked to the window to see what was causing the sun to seem so much brighter, she was hoping for snow. She looked out and didn't notice anything strange. She noticed something on the right side of her window and flinched when she saw that Cat was up on the roof! How'd he get up there?
Please, feel free to critique. The best critique will be advice on how to fix the problems.
Thanks guys!
Elise
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