Seeing Red Riding through the Hood

It was chance-and no clean laundry-(must be washed separately or Do Not mix with Whites!), she was wearing all red riding her rusted squeaky bike through the poor neighborhood on her way to her mean grandmother’s house. That wretched witch with a living mole, breath like onions, skin like a prune, always made her do her homework right when she came through the door and then practice math with her illegible homemade flashcards with the answers showing through. She would count using in crummy-year-old sugar cookies from a Christmas tin, afterschool cookies,  

“You have four sugar cookies, two were eaten by the porky little red girl, how many are left?” 

If she got the answer right she was rewarded with the cookie. Her grandmother thought she loved them. Instead, she hid them in her pocket, crumbled them into blonde sand with a tight angry fist, and she would sprinkle the lumpy grains on that old lady's flower bed to attract the bugs. 

(Too) Many nights she had to spend the night at the stinky old shoe house with its cauldron of bitter coffee always burning underneath the reeking smell of musty Ponds, the lotion, not the murky water. The children of the old lady had forgotten about little leftover her again. They disappeared for days at a time, that was nothing new. Rather than spend the night in the sty of the three little pigs she called ‘friends’ she opted to stay where none could find her. Nobody was looking anyway. That made the stench more welcoming. 

Maybe you have seen the little girl riding her bike through town?

One afternoon last week, wearing clean multi-colored clothes, she stopped off at a creek with an inviting low lying branch from a fallen tree that overhung the water below.  

She removed her shoes, tied her red hooded sweatshirt to her waist and balance beamed her way, foot over foot, to the middle of the creek where she sat, her palms clutching curly strands of moss. Swirling her big toe in figure eights, she reached into her pocket for some old cookie crumbs to bait some fish when she heard a crack. She looked down and then back toward the river bank in desperation as if something could save her-only to be met with two green eyes of an intent mountain lion. There were flashes of blue, yellow, red and then just a crummy ending and the river slowly dancing by. Bluejays were found pecking and squawking at the pockets of her red hooded sweatshirt

that an angry girl once filled. But nobody noticed-she got an A in math.

Image credited By Miami U. Libraries - Digital Collections, c. 1900 'Doctor Jayn'es Sanatative Pills' [No restrictions or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.