Anne, not Annie
By Helen Feng
There was a child named Anne...
Anne is just a normal children from a the countryside,not so different from the other children.She enjoys to be in the countryside, here, the children can run freely around in the fields. The lifestyle is simple here, it isn’t like the noisy cities where there are so many lights in the night, even at midnight.
Anne learns later than the other children her age, when the others started to play games outside, she just learned to walk by the wall, And when they begins to learn poems and songs, she has only learned to communicate with the most basic words. The old people who likes to gossip told her mother to have another child, because she might have Intellectual disabilities ( which is the fancy word for retarded).Of course her mother did not believe them, not even a bit, she think that her daughter was as normal as everyone else. Her mother continues to teach her how to talk with complete sentences and how to walk from one house to another.
The days of spring quickly passed, as the one of the most remarkable day of Anne’s life came, the air was full of the sweet smell of grass and crops. Anne, as a four-year-old little girl, who just learned to run, ran happily on the yard in front of her home.
Soon, the girl was tired of running, so she sat down on the ground and started to squish an orange playdoh together with a yellow one. When is mom coming home? The little girl thought to herself, it is lunch time already and she is getting very hungry. Does it always takes so long to buy a fish for lunch?
A few minutes later an anxious woman ran to the child.
“Auntie, do you like bunny?”
The girl carefully held the light orange playdoh like if it falls on the ground would shatter into pieces. She had just morphed it into a ball shaped object with two long things on top, just as the woman ran into the room. The girl held the piece of play doh close to the woman’s face so she could see it very clearly and tell her that she had done well.
“Oh poor child!”The woman exclaimed, ignoring the “bunny” completely, hugged the girl and started to cry, tears started to fall out her eyes. “How could god do this to such a sweet little girl!”
Anne was both shocked and scared by the woman, she has never seen her auntie been like this before. She knew that something is wrong the minute she saw her auntie, although she doesn’t want to admit it. It must be something really terrible to make a person who’s always smiling cry, she thought, but what? What terrible thing could happen on such a beautiful day?
Auntie wiped away her tears and took the little girl’s hand, and took her to the river. There is a crowd beside the river, there are so many people that she even wonders if the whole village was all gathered here. Anne had never remember seeing so many people altogether before in my life.
There was a moment of silence of the crowd when they saw her, then, they started murmuring words in low voices, words that she doesn’t understand. That made Anne felt very uncomfortable and wanted to run home, she small fist broke free from auntie's hand, just then, she saw the center of the crowd. It was Anne’s father. Anne ran as fast as she can towards her father who is kneeling beside a piece of white cloth on the grass with his head down.
“Papa, let’s go! Let’s go home, I am scared!” Anne pulled her father’s arm as hard as she can, but her father didn’t move a bit. “Come on, papa!”
Just then Anne noticed then there is something under the white cloth, shaped much like a human body. She let go of her father and touched the cloth gently, it is just as soft as she thought it would be. Then, Anne curiously lifted the cloth, there lays a beautiful woman: her mother.
Anne poked the familiar face of her mother, her skin was colder, and paler too. “Wake up, mommy! Everyone is staring at you! Wake up and let’s go home together!” Anne shaked her mother, but no matter how hard she shakes, her mother shows no signs of waking up. “Mommy!” Anne starts crying, she doesn’t know why, but she feels very scared.
“......Anne,your mother is…...dead.” Anne’s father explained, his voice hoarse. “A dead person could not…...wake up.”Anne does not know what his father meant by then, she does not know what his father meant by “dead” and “could not wake up”. It’s too hard for a four-year-old to understand death.
Even until they put her mother’s body into a coffin, when the lid covered her mother. Even after Anne goes home with only her father, she still believes that someday, she will find out that her mother is only having a really long sleep, and they will live together happily ever after like in fairy tales her mother used to tell her before bedtime.
[ Those who believed god will survive enternency. ]
Anne’s mother believed god crazily so she will not die.