Men

“Charlie,” she said, drawing it out.

“Charlie,” Charlie mimicked, drawing it out further.

“Please, please, please!” Lucy said. She stood in the center of her big brother’s bedroom holding her favorite doll next to her cheek. Lucy’s eyes were wide and blue. The doll’s eyes were wide and blue also, and had long black eyelashes.

“Please, please, please,, what?” Charlie demanded. He put his pencil down on his book report with a loud slap and turned in his swivel chair and studied his little sister holding her Barbie doll where he could not fail to see it.

They stared at each other.

“Lucy, you’re not supposed to come in here during homework!”

“Look what happened to her skirt," Lucy said. She fought against tears by looking up at the ceiling and batting her eyes.

Charlie focused on the doll’s skirt. It was a black mini-skirt. The doll, Charlie couldn’t help thinking, looked fine; a mini-skirt, long legs, a tight fitting pink t-shirt, and black knee-high, leather boots.

Very fine.

Lucy displayed the rip in the mini-skirt.

“Go ask Mom,” Charlie said.

Their mother was down stairs laid out on the sofa watching television with a vodka soda in a tall, plastic to-go coffee mug. The lights in the room were most likely either off or turned down low, the television was probably too loud, and their mother was no doubt snoring softly as the to-go mug rose and fell on her stomach still clenched in a tight hand that would hold firm until morning.

They both knew Charlie's remedy wasn’t going to play out.

“Oh my God, Charlie, please, can’t you fix it?”

“Fix it? What do you want me to do, sew it?”

Lucy looked at her big brother, the doll still next to her cheek.

"That isn't in my job description," Charlie said. And then, “Fine! Great! Go get the sewing basket."

Lucy went down stairs and passed her mother on the couch and brought the sewing-basket back into Charlie’s room.

“Thank you, Charlie,” she said handing the basket and the doll over. “I don't know what I'd do without you!”

She watched her big brother lick the thread.

Men are like children, she thought, watching him in silence.

300 words--