Little Faerie

              It would be quite a while later until there was any wonderment at the contrast of her physical strength and the amount needed for the deed.  Such a tiny little doll, the downy pale blond hair wisped about her shoulders, eyes covert behind a few loose locks.  She had grey eyes, large and faerie-like, that never ceased to somewhat startle the father whenever he walked in upon her wide, blank-eyed reveries.  Of course, the startle would vanish as quickly as the whip descended upon her thin, stooping shoulders.  Scrambling like a frightened fawn, the child awoke every morning to this whip, rushing past the father to the kitchen. 
              With the man's livid shouts behind her, the pale legs so crisscrossed over with lash marks and slithering purple scars, would flee for the tin bucket and soiled rag.  In all haste her hands as small as a doll's, but far from equal beauty, then commenced the first chore of the day scrubbing floors.  Her sharp knees had long been stained red and rough with constant friction against unkind tile and stinging soap.
              An elfin, eight, and not three and a half feet, she spoke with the natural timidity and softness a life of suffering renders.  Her upper lip had only recently been so angrily slashed with a knife by the father in a drunken fit.  It was an agonizing process, having it heal; delicate as the mouth is already, any newly forming scar was prone to rip yet again.  A pretty little nose, straight and well formed, redeemed in part the brutality of the cut.  The heavy sleep lines further added to a haggard expression.  Her face was haunting, as if one saw two sides in it: forever lost in pain and desolation, and the queerest echo of another land, a faerie's countenance set in defiance. The pink of her dress had washed to a pale shade, not that the loss of its original color mattered any.  The dirt was as much a component of the cloth as the remaining dye, having worked itself into the seams over the years.  Thin, cold fingers comfortingly running over the torn embroidery of the hem...her mother had once stitched them.  She was gone now, to the land so distant, and only her then properly kept daughter had missed her, bare neck stretched to the sky days after her death to see her there.  The child had been taught survival by fear, sick hatred by the same name.
             
              The man either possesses no worthy character to expound upon, or is not worth the effort.  Simply put, he places a strain upon the adage that claims love should be shown towards all men.  Thirty-two, tall and lean, his relatively decent appearance of garb doles no justice to his daughter's.  If you'd laid your hand upon his heart, you would sense a beat, but no accompanying warmth.  A little hair sprinkling his cheeks, it gives off the appearance that he'd been out all night somewhere, thus having no time to be clean shaven, or perhaps he really does not care.  His snarl incredulously out-expresses the cruelty of a terrible and mighty beast upon a blood scent.  A stereotypical dub to be sure, but to humor such, it is true the man partakes of his share in spirits, only not overindulgently, if that be any scoring point.  His large, tawny hands have near strangled the life from his girl many a time, dark grey eyes as powerful and emotionless as a thunderous sky.  Bronze from his work as a blacksmith, hair dark auburn, voice a quietly deep intonation that measures each phrase with an apathetical tinge, not one would superficially discover any objectionable thing. 
         "Rhiannon!"
         "Father! I'm here, sir!"
A powerful strike felled her little frame, bare feet stumbling backwards upon the counter.
         "And why, girl, if you are here, were you not here last night?"
         "Sir?"
         "These dishes!  Explain, this instant, why they are not done!"
         "But sir, they were all done last night!  I promise Father, they were!"  The truth was in her words, but when the father had finished his supper last night after she'd retired, his dishes were then in want of cleaning, so thus the truth was interpreted slightly in his perspective.  His lip snarled, and his hand went out for his belt.  Rhiannon felt her heart atrophy, eyes springing wide to the lash of the leather in the air, teeth clenched behind her lips.  There are people that live in such joy with their loves, that stand with the warm sun and ethereal breeze, and remark within them how truly blessed they are when compared to certain others.  Well, Rhiannon was a certain other, and all the gratitude people held for their lives, all the thanks they praised the One above with, was worthless to her.  It changed nothing.
             
                Splotchy red, skin wrinkled much more than any elderly person he'd ever seen, and still he held her with amazement and admiration.  She was his daughter.  Their daughter.  He'd even laughed with his beloved wife how impatient he was of having her head firm up so he'd be able to lavish it with kisses.  His wife and he always jested of who she resembled the more as she became a toddler, with her blue eyes turning light grey and hair of spun gold.  The baby had once, at Milliana's loving coaxing to pronounce Ma-ma, stubbornly shook her dainty curls, turned toward him, and loudly announced Da-da.  Laughing uproariously, he went over to the child and commended her, Millie all the while with tight lips of feigned disapproval.  Then like the sun breaking, she too began to laugh, reaching over to tussle his auburn hair.  His beloved wife.  If he had never, ever left with his men on that hunting expedition to Larkspring, Millie might have laughed with him for many more years.  He might have been there to see the girl as she awoke from her nap and pulled herself from under her quietly resting mother's arm.  He might have been down in the kitchen to catch the tow-headed one as she reached up for the knob of the back door, and caught up her little feet as they tripped down the steps.  He would have held her to him, kissed the mussed curls, and asked what was she trying to do, run away from Daddy dear?  No, he wouldn't have; he was a hundred miles away when Millie fell into her grave.
              There was a beautiful river down behind the last row of their peach orchard, cozily crossed with a quaint wooden bridge.  Millie and him, or oftener just Millie, took their girl to frolic upon the banks.  Hand in hand, skirts held carefully up, the two ventured from time to time to wade ankle deep.  Sometimes Millie instructed her to stand absolutely still, and after a long, long while, the minnows they'd originally frightened away tentatively graced around their bare feet.  It was to this river the child skipped to from the back door of the kitchen, a delicate mist of rain accumulating.
              By the time Mille was roused by thunder, she'd already run quite a ways down the bank.  Drowning fear swaying her sprinting feet, she fled down to where she knew the child had gone, and stood upon the dark wooden bridge, screaming for her beloved, the pouring rain saturating her body.  Millie staggered off the planks, running along the broiling waters, hands cupped, screaming, screaming.  She presently took refuge on the branches of a tree that stretched out over the river, raw, red hands gripping the limbs, wide eyes that scanned all around her pulsating with hysteria.  The crack sounded like any other lash of thunder, the resonance deafening, so near it seemed.  The whole livid scene suddenly went awash with silent brilliancy, the heralding of the death strike, and Millie spun gasping around to see a shaft of sheer blinding white light burn the whole length of the tree and touch her.  Even as her body fell beneath the torrents, she saw her, her daughter, blue-grey eyes shining as she tugged at her long skirt, and her own hand reaching for the little one's. 
             
              Rhiannon.  He looked upon her sickbed with a type of regret that if only she had never awoken....  The men had found her almost paralytic from the cold, a miserable and freezing bundle, lungs in continual spasms of coughing.  He became impassive in the next days, sitting in the foggy haze not yet cleared with reality.  Rhiannon was tended to stiffly, silently, and rather emotionlessly.  As every person that undergoes loss asks the ubiquitous- why?, as did he.  And sitting by his daughter's bedside, he gained his answer.  Because of her.  Because of her disobedience and foolishness.  Because of her, Milliana had died under that tree in the storm, that his beloved would never walk with him again, that he sat now a widower and a father of a motherless child.  And as each new revelation came to him, a spark of the subtlest hate flamed.  He began to resent Rhiannon.  That murderer child, for what reason in mind did she possibly have for running out that day?  For whatever reason?  She caused it all, the brat.  She would pay, every day of her life.  The child had killed his wife.
         
              "Sir, where do you wish me to put these?", Rhiannon tentatively held up, with difficulty, two or three cans of rusty odds and ends.  The father cocked his head towards her.
         "In the lean to, and snap to it, or today will be your sixth day in abstinence from food."  The young one lowered her head and skittered out of his presence.  When she returned, the father was standing with his back to her at the kitchen counter, fiddling with a metal contraption.
         "Go and fetch me my tool box out in the barn, you know where it is."  She really did not, and shaking, related so.  He put his device very deliberately down, turned slowly about and struck her full in the face.  Rhiannon had learned long ago to never cry out, and instead allowed her heart to absorb every blow for her.  He turned away from her just as measured.  The girl fled out to the barn and scoured his work bench desperately, opened every cluttered shelf and cupboard, but could locate nothing.  A small hand across her mouth, she leaned against a wall terrified.  She really could not find the box anywhere.  A few minutes frivoled away, and looking out upon the expanse of green from the barn to the house, the horribleness of returning empty handed trembled her.  Yet she stepped her little brown shoe resolutely out and passed something that whirled her about.  The toolbox.  It sat on the grass outside the eastern wall of the barn.  Nauseous with relief, Rhiannon lugged it into her thin arms, and realizing her delay, sprinted across the field as well she could with such a weight.  She all but fell against the kitchen's back door, and as she stumbled across the threshold, accidentally and mistakenly tumbled the box and all its contents to the floor.  Very mistakenly. 
         "You brat child!"  Rhiannon fell to her scrawny knees as quickly as was capable of her and began to fumble the various instruments back into proper placement.  She tried to work hastily by way of frightened reparation, but still the father had long snapped into his fist the whip and sharply descended it twice, thrice.  Tears shaking in her eyes behind their shield of loose hair, Rhiannon offered up the now restored toolbox to him.  He grabbed it and licked the lash across her bent legs.
         "For that insolence, girl, you starve today! Again!  Get out of my sight and on to your room!" 
              Her room was a mere horse stall in the rear of the barn, but forget palaces and cozy cottages, it was her haven.  Rhiannon collapsed upon the straw pallet, and drew the worn blue quilt about her.  Mother...her lingering perfume was still there after so many long years.  Night was approaching; she would be needed no longer by the father.  Oh, it was cold.  But never would anything be as cold as that wintry night some years back.
                He had been angry with her, what she'd done she could not recall; he was always angry her.  She was following him back across the incredibly thick snowed in fields of the woods to home.  He did not care to wait for her, and presently her little legs had begun to tire, dropped back from him, and lost him.  She called for him timidly at first, then when some time passed, began to scream Father!  Two or three hours later in frigid cold after her hands had cracked and bled, hair frozen to her head, and absolutely in a frenzy that there was hardly any sensation in her lower legs, Rhiannon had fallen upon the back door porch.  Standing shakily up, she saw through the parted calico curtains of the window pane the father kindling a flame in the fireplace.  She burst into tears.  He had not given one rip about his daughter stranded out in the blizzard of the woods near hypothermia.  Rhiannon now crept up from her pallet and softly eased a side door of the barn open, crossed the pasture on that end timidly, and exited the gate.
              There was a rubbish heap of substantial size and height that dominated the side of the path a ways from their gate.  Rhiannon walked about aimlessly, gazing at the ugly mound of unwanted things, spoiled and hideous.  Presently she began to take more interest in the rubble with the intention of perchance chancing upon some odd trinket or other.  She was not afraid of dirt and garbage, a life accustomed to it rendering her this way, and she began to pick odds and ends off the sides.  Meeting her expectations, there really was nothing worthwhile, and she made to turn away.  And then there was the little doll.  It was a sort of cheap glassy china, with honey brown hair dirty and a bit frizzled, once so perfectly curled and glossy.  The white pinafore it donned had ruffles at its sleeves and lace at the hem.  White silk stockings, white leather patent buckled shoes, and all was soiled over, but not much.  Rhiannon eased the doll out by its diminutive hand, and held it out at an arm's length.  The doll had real glass eyes of the queerest teal-green that closed when one tilted its head, framed in black lashes.  Its face was sullied over, and Rhiannon spat upon her dress and rubbed away the muck.  A shade of pale white was more visible to the eye then, the painted lips and the pert nose as well.  Her gay smile lifted slightly only the corner of a scarlet mouth.  The more Rhiannon stared with a child's gaze at it, the more she was endeared to it, for it seemed as if the doll knew things she was foreign to, yet might one day acquire.  She hugged the thing to her thin chest, turned, and retreated to her room. 
         
              "Millie! Millie, do you know what he did to me today?"  Rhiannon tugged her pitiful dress up to her thighs, to reveal brutal and livid marks where the blood was broiling under the skin, provoked by the heavy metal end of the belt.  Millie sat silent, only looking with that knowing smile of hers.  The doll had become her mute confidante, the one to whom she ran to with scalding tears when the father had only just beaten her from one end of the kitchen to the other, the one with whom she gritted her teeth at in the night, sharp whispers of the extent of her hate and her fear of him reaching the friend's closed ear.  Rhiannon was nine now, and for her to still engage play with dolls and their frills would have made the father harshly laugh, but when one's life is an abyss of desolation, any semblance of a smiling face thrills you.  Of course, the golden-haired girl was very much wary in concealing Millie, the doll's refuge generally being within the scratchy confines of the pallet.  But there was never any complaint evinced upon her part.  She heard with wide eyes and silent lips.
         
                "Why is not the manure cleaned away?  Do you dare frivol my time to ask you such petty things?"
         "Oh!  Sir!  I'm so sorry, please, but I hadn't any time to get to that chore yet-I had such a time getting the cow in from the pasture."
         "Whatever delayed you so doesn't hold any regard to me, Rhiannon!  I needed to take up the floor boards today, and yet here I am delayed by your laziness."
         " But I wasn't being lazy!"  Rhiannon had learned very well to never beg, grovel, or defend herself in any combination or circumstance.  But she risked a desperate plea anyway when she discerned the father's evil gleam come into his eye.  Even before she could register her body to cower from the much expected blow, something it was well trained in doing, defecation had entered her nose, and so filthily entwined itself in her hair.  The father finally permitted the wildly squirming Rhiannon up from the pile of feces, the gore smeared in long disgusting streaks upon her dress.
         "Get out!  I do not care whether you had time or not!  When I execute an order, there is nothing I expect to hinder me from having it done!  Go on, out!"  And he pivoted and thundered away, the tremendous clash of the wide barn door closing withdrawing much of the sunlight, and leaving her in gloomy solitude.  Rhiannon burst into hysterics running for Millie, and gathered her up, clothes soiled and all.  For an hour or so, she raged to her, fits of tears shuddering her scrawny frame at interspersed moments.  Rhiannon contrived dearly to make herself decent, and though much of the substantial material was removed, and the hideous discoloration redeemed some with water and lye, the overpowering scent plagued her.  The tiny elfin sighing, she began to commence what she had so repulsively paid for in failing to do earlier.
             
              Some months arrived and whisked themselves away, and still the father's whip continued to mark the start and end of day, not the sun, not the moon.  Millie's undiscovered and surely contraband existence still stayed in the recesses of the unknown.  Rhiannon spoke to her each morn and night, sufferings and darkly colored despise breathed from her lips as if the china really could hear.  She lay one noon upon her poking straw pallet when the father no longer mandated her raw working hands for the time being.  Millie rested on her knees, and Rhiannon mimicked a soft, high-pitched voice for her in a tea-like conversation.  Her grey eyes dilated and stared at Millie's teal-green with piteous fear.   
         "Rhiannon!"  His heavy boots thudded the wooden threshold outside the barn.  With crazed franticness, Millie was pushed hastily beneath the mattress.  The father entered and stood before her.
         "Well, and get up!"  Rhiannon staggered aright, heart earth quaking tremendously, lips compressed so as to render them near white. 
         "And why do you look at me such, girl?"  Rhiannon clenched her palms behind her back.
         "Nothing, Father.  I mean nothing."  His dark grey eyes echoed lightening, and he roughly shoved her aside, stooped, and drew Millie from beneath her shelter.  Rhiannon's heart convulsed and disintegrated.  The father said nothing, moved not, only held Millie in his bronze hand.  If she had had a kingdom, Rhiannon would have traded it all for the assurance of her beloved doll back within her possession.  His eyes seared the pallor of his daughter's downcast face.  Wordlessly he twisted Millie's head from her fine, white shoulders, moved from the barn to the side gate, and flung both objects out beyond.  Rhiannon saw him through the window.  He returned.
         "You worthless sly, sneaky brat child."  The creaking barn door swung after his departure.  She stood there with her eyes wide and disbelieving.  Where was the inevitable beating, the unavoidable lashings, the livid shouts of promised days of more starvation?  For there was not an ounce of doubt she had breached a very serious taboo: keeping a plaything in secrecy from him, thus directing indirect falsehoods, and for how long?  From the mussed look of Millie, he might have assumed for quite some time and that was true, but she'd looked in that manner from the day she found her.  When Rhiannon had accomplished every chore in her responsibility in the evening, she passed from the front of the barn out the side door, down to the gate.
              He had catapulted her a mighty distance, but in a little over a half hour, Rhiannon had located both parts of Millie under the waxing sunrays.  Small hands shaking, she lovingly pieced her together, and stood in the road, gently kissing her honey brown hair. 
              Something transacted between two creatures out there in the dimly lit lane, thought it is a very bewildering idea to believe, as there was only one being and the other inanimate.  But it was so.  Rhiannon stood motionless for almost eternity until the dark of night had glided  down and hushed all noise.  And when her faerie grey eyes opened slowly at last in the black, the intensity almost heralded the coming of dawn. 
         
              The milkman picked up the iron knocker, letting it fall, then waited, balancing his weekly delivery of cream in the bright sun.  When no one responded for quite some time, he left.  And there was no answer from within the day after, nor the next.  When some men of the town knocked down the door some days later, they found the father lying upon the bed, his corpse nailed to the mattress with a spike through his forehead.