Linda dreams and draws

That afternoon, Linda's hatred from lunchtime hand long since burned its brightest. What is left were only ashes and smoke, black with despair. She scratched her pen across her paper and her eyes almost blind seemed to drift across words and across worlds.

The shut curtains didn't let in any evening light, and the dank electric light stained the walls a sick yellow. There is a moth flying around it, a large and noisy one. Apart from that, and the occasional car that hummed by the house, there is only the sound of the pen.

It had been like this for years now, but Linda had never felt it quite as much as this – this loneliness.

As she tore through problems, her writing appeared to get wilder and barely fit the lines and, thought she couldn't place the exact moment it happened, she found herself in a golden wheat field.

The sun is shining and, though there were clouds in the sky, they too were glowing in the purest white. There is a breeze, gentle and constant, only enough to sway the grass so that it tickled Linda's bare legs.

Linda noticed that she is naked and looked at herself, almost sparkling in the sunlight. She didn't try to cover herself up and looked around at the hilly expanse.

In the distance, she could see a house with a footpath that wound its way by her and then away behind a hill.

Linda stretched her arms out to enjoy the warmth.

"How could a world possibly be this wonderful?" Linda thought to herself.

Then in the distance behind her, she heard a child crying. She turned, but there seemed to be nothing but field into the horizon.

She walked toward the sound, searching for the source and after about a minute of walking she came into a small clearing. At one end of it, with her legs pressed tightly against her chest, is a little girl.

As Linda began to approach the girl, her hand outstretched and about to call out, the clinking of keys tore the illusion away from Linda, and she is back in her room with her pen still on her notebook. She tried to grasp the illusion again, but she couldn't. The little girl is well and truly gone, it seemed.

The door clicked behind her, and her hairs on her neck stand on end as she sensed her father.

"How could daddy back already?" She though. "How could the time have passed so fast?"

"Have you finished?" He asked. The floorboards creaking as he approached her.

Linda looked at the notebook in her dismay. Not only had she not completed, her writing had enlarged and flowed onto the following page into a wonderful, but incomplete sketch.

The drawing is of a bright wheat field. The one that she was on just moments before – with a spiralling sun and light wispy clouds and a lush field with a house surfing on a hill and with that light footpath that went on into the distance. Below that is the crying girl she had seen. She is naked and had her face on her knees as she cried. As Linda ran her hands over it almost, in a trance, she felt that peaceful warmth again, but once again this only lasted for a moment before her father snatched the book away from under her hands.

"You were drawing again." Her father growled.

"I-I didn't mean to, daddy."

"How can you draw without meaning to, you idiot?" Her father tore out the page from her notebook.

"Please no, daddy, stop!" Linda stood up, for a moment forgetting her place, but then she saw her father's monstrous expression and her legs shook.

"What did you say?" He barked, furious, but also startled by the outburst. He ran over and struck her in the arm in quick succession. "I come home after a hard day working so that I can make money to feed you and send you to school, and this is how you treat me? You can even listen to a single instruction and-" He hesitated, as though even the thought of the next word sickened him. "Draw?"

"If you carry on like this, you're going to end up just like your mother, with broken dreams and washing people's bottoms for the rest of your life." He said and handed the paper to Linda. "Tear it up."

"Please daddy."

"I said tear it up now!"

Linda's hands shook as she took the paper. She looked the page again. Although it was crumpled by her father's hand, the warmth hadn't left it. It shone like a star in this hostile space.

"I may not be able to see you again." She thought tears forming in her eyes as she spoke to the little girl. "But thank you for letting me draw you."

She leaned down and kissed the girl. As she did, she lit a fire inside herself and without letting herself think any more, she ripped apart her child into a hundred pieces. They fell like ash onto the floor. Linda's legs gave way, and she sat on the floor and sobbed.

"If I see you drawing again," Her father said, as he stripped and headed into the shower. "I won't hold back, thinking that you're my daughter – I'll beat you till you're half dead and leave you in the street. Nobody wants a child that doesn't obey."