The Red Haired Girl

“I feel cold and desolate.” She says in a hushed tone. Around her chilled body, there’s nothing but fog whirling throughout the air, and patches of crispy grass beneath her bare feet. Her nostrils are so frozen, her sense of smell has completely vanished.

“Why is it so cold?” She now hastily wraps her arms around her chest and starts to pace throughout the fog. Even with the eyelash hairs now too tender to touch, for the chance they might shatter making it difficult to shut her eyes, she still could not make out anything through the thickness of the white mist. Suddenly, in the distance she hears a faint voice, “What do you see?”

She continues to pace her frigid body around to only be encircled in more of the thick white fog. It is safe to say that she is completely lost, and in the middle of nowhere. “It’s just fog and it’s getting really cold. I don’t think I should be here.”

A strand of yellow light begins to peak through the mist, and the girl with curiosity now overtaking her uncontrollable shivers starts to move towards it. The lighting has overtaken the fog to expose a big brown wooden cabin only a few feet away from where she stands. Her excitement for warmth would have made her jog to knock on the door if it hadn’t suddenly sprung open by the hands of a burly man behind it. Even though he was heavier built, and the cigar smuggled between his lips above his rugged beard gave the impression he is probably under some stress, he seems really welcoming… and familiar.

He plucks the cigar from out his mouth, and places it in between his fingers and asks, “Are you lost? Would you like to come inside?” The tone of his voice brought back heavy nostalgia, something that brought warmth to her body and almost immediately to her heart.

“Dad?” Her lips tremble as she speaks to the man. Before she could say anything else, he walks away from the door down what it looks like an endless lit up hallway, leaving it open as if he were expecting her to come inside. She steadily steps into the cabin, and the wooden door shuts unexpectedly causing her to jump and turn her focus from her father to the door. As she regains her composure, now facing forward she notices her father is now nowhere in sight.

She begins to slowly walk down the hallway to notice some peculiar paintings placed on the wall. One that immediately strikes her attention, a portrait of a ginger haired girl in a beige sweater sitting by a lake of some sort with thick white fog in the distance. She was smiling with porcelain white teeth, almost as if she had burst out into a fit of laughter, the type that brings you to tears. Her portrait was bright but at the same time so gloomy.

“Who is sh...” Before the girl could make out the rest of her words, a pair of arms sprang out from behind her grasping around her neck.

“Margery!” A stern voice yells. “Alright she’s had enough!”

Margery still facing the portrait, friskily moving, and struggling to breath with her neck in the arms of someone who she couldn’t see. “He…” Is all she could make out with the little bit of air she manages to get every second she feels the muscles loosen a little.

“1…” She hears distantly through the ringer of her ears that feel as if they are about to burst and have now turned to cherry red. “2…” A bright white light is beaming the portrait of the red headed girl blinding Margery’s eyes. “3!” She now has opened her eyes to see that she is back at her psychologist’s office still sitting in the brown heavily padded leather chair.

“Margery.” Her mother quickly reaches out to comfort her and places the warmth of her hands over her cheeks in a fit of worry. “Are you okay?”

She nods her head abruptly to reassure her anxious mother. “I’m fine mother. There was a man and a girl.”

A woman who also has red like hair although hers resembled a little closer to brown, uncrossed her legs from the brown leather chair, like the one Margery is sitting on. She places her pen and pad down on the mini glass table that sits beside her. She speaks in an anxious tone, but not out of worry like Margery’s mother, more out of curiosity, “What did they look like?”

Her ears are still ringing, and she had felt a tension on her forehead and neck as if the event had really occurred. She couldn’t manage to remember the portrait; her memories went black. Her mother notices that she is having trouble thinking through the pressure from the hypnosis. “Alright. That’s enough! Can’t she see she’s under some sort of trauma. Margery, get your stuff.”

She hastily grabs her purse, and her daughters’ things for her. Margery slowly gets up still dazed from the experience. She looks over to her left and focuses on a picture placed on the small glass table near where her psychologist had sat her pen and pad.

“Margery. What’s the matter with you? Let’s go.” Her mother notices the bewildered expression on her face as she focuses on the picture.

Margery shifts her face towards her psychologist, and back on the picture then back on her psychologist. “Are you, her mother?”