Fourteen Yellow Roses

749 words, written for the Senior Center Forum contest.

A brief description: One night Willie Frank has a nightmare telling her that her father is no longer alive, or did she?

Fourteen Yellow Roses

***

Willie Frank screamed and sat up in bed. Somewhere beyond her, out there in the dark blackness, a rooster crowed. And an owl hooted once. Willie Frank's grandmother had told her that was a bad sign . . .

         So what if that banty rooster crowed a little early this morning; and that old owl homesteading out there in the yard hooted one time? It didn't make any nevermind to Willie Frank, to her it wasn't any particular occurrence.

          It was the nightmare which concerned her. She was still crying and fear clung to her heart.

         Willie Frank rose from her bed while the tears yet ran down her cheeks, and crept over to the little nook, where she kept what she liked to refer to as her medicine, to find herself some solace. I think it was just a dream, but was it? Willie Frank spoke in that place where only she could hear her words.

         Willie Frank smiled as she fiddled with the pouch in her hand. It was her quilt, her teddy bear.

          The small, burlap tobacco sack held all the precious moments she had been able to accumulate in her first thirteen years on this earth. Of course, except all the yellow roses her daddy had given her.

         All her beloved moments were warm and snug beneath its drawstrings. Times like this one, stolen when her Mama and that other man she had taken up with were abed, were what kept her from crying her heart.¹

          Eagerly, she loosened the sack's drawstrings and spilled its contents into the shallow bowl of her cupped hands. Each and every precious moment she held in her hands had a story of the telling; and sometimes to Willie Frank it seemed that they all had a life of their own.

         Take the tiny, mother-of-pearl penknife for example, the one inlaid with the three pink roses, the one her daddy had taken out of the pocket of his overalls and pressed into her hand just before he had set out on the thirty mile walk to Pikeville and didn't come back for six months.

         That knife. That knife had a story to tell; and Willie Frank had heard it so many times, she could repeat it, word for word.

         There lay the folded up certificate the Pike County Board of Education had given her, now faded and curled around its edges. The light blue hairpin her Mama had pinned in her hair in the minutes before Willie Frank had walked down to the schoolhouse to get her picture taken for the eighth grade graduation stared up at her. Didn't that make Willie Frank smile?

         And a locket somewhat jaded, but precious still.

***

Don't forget the locket Andrew had hung around her neck just before he had slobbered all over her first kiss. Darn that no-account, two-timing Andrew any way. She'd seen him and that Sue Evelyn, don't think she hadn't, hunkered down about as low as they could get, in the dark seats over at the Twi-Lite Theater last Friday night.

          Of a sudden Willie Frank jumped up, spilling all her beloved moments onto the floor. Running down the cock-eyed stairs, Willie Frank entered the kitchen and reached up to pull the string to turn on that old, naked light bulb. And there they were.

         Fourteen yellow roses. In that same old, rust-streaked Mason jar, setting by the water bucket just like Daddy did it every time.

          She took them out of the jar one by one, smelling each one and counting them as she went. Fourteen. One for each year of her life.

         Daddy wasn't dead; Willie Frank just knew he wasn't. He was upstairs in his room just like always.

         Didn't the fourteen yellow roses make it true?

          And that old dream had told her the lie that her Mama had taken up with another man . . .

          Somewhere out there in the dark blackness, the rooster crowed. Willie Frank smiled. That old rooster has let something get into him, making him crow early two days in a row, she thought. And if that old owl wanted to open up his mouth just to hoot only once, it sure didn't make any nevermind to Willie Frank.

         Today was going to be the best day of her life.

***

The end.

¹(crying her heart) That's how we say it in parts of Kentucky.