Bare feet whispered on bare wood floors as the girl danced her way around the upstairs library, stopping only to curtsy to the dead woman in the ancient leather chair. She resumed her dance and turned in place, holding the hem of her dress out in one hand, the other arched over her head with delicate fingers pointing. “I wish I had studied ballet,” she said as she paused in front of the sagging face with the sightless open eyes. “I would have been a beautiful ballerina.” A Tiffany lamp, glowing dimly from the round table beside the chair, cast pallid shadows across the dead woman’s cheeks and her heavy arms rested limp and lifeless along the chair arms. The wispy white hair falling across the slumped shoulders, and the hairbrush on the floor at the woman’s feet, told of the old woman’s last moments. The girl knelt and placed her hands on the old woman’s knees. A cardboard cigar box sat in the woman’s lap, its lid open. The girl closed the lid, leaned forward and looked into the vacant sightless eyes. The girl’s vibrant youth clashed with the inanimateness of death. “I know you’ll thank me the next time we meet,” the girl said. “He needs to come home, to find his family once again. He needs to forgive you.” The girl paused, her own face now illuminated by the soft glow. She picked up the brush from the floor and stroked it through the strands of dark brown at her breast. “Your hair was like mine once, long and fine and dark. It’s a shame mine will never be like yours—so soft and white.” The girl touched the dead woman’s hair with a single sad stroke of the brush and then placed the brush back on the floor. She stood and removed the box from the dead woman’s lap. “Yes, I will bring the box to him when he comes home. I will make sure he gets it, and that he knows it was from you,” she said, as if in reply to a request from the dead woman’s cracked parted lips. A car door slammed in the distance and a voice called from outside. “Time for me to go,” the girl said as her glance traveled to the window and back to the woman. She softly patted the old woman’s knurled hand with its now sunken veins. “I loved our time together, and I’m glad I was able to bring some peace to your dying days. I’m glad you enjoyed my dancing. Goodbye Granny Blackburn. I’ll see you again, real soon.” The girl turned on her feet with a swish of her dress and hurried from the library with the box protected in her grasp. She glided down the stairs and down the hall toward the back door, her feet as silent as the air in the house. The old woman in the chair sat with her eyes motionless, her heart still, her lungs stopped. As the front door downstairs opened and closed with a bang, and the back door closed without notice, the wrinkled right hand shifted on the arm of the chair. The lifeless fingers relaxed, the hand opened and a small silver object fell from its death clutch to disappear into the folds of the cracked leather chair.
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