multiples

I have a lot of dreams that involve multiples. Twins. Triplets. My mother is a twin so it might have something to do with that. I had this incredible dream about some triplets last year that I think about almost monthly because it was a dream like dreams I have before where I'm watching a TV movie, like the one that this crappy short story below seems like

Spring Daughter

This is the story about a father. The father looks a little like Garey Busey but with more heart and soul because he's a hero father. A single father of a daughter.

His wife either died or left him and he lived in a small town where the springs are like heaven. Each awakening flower growing from the formerly icy ground reaches for the sky with such vigor that you can almost hear the grunt of the soil as it allows the roots to separate themselves from it. It has no choice but to step aside and let the flower break through and that's just what this father does.

You can hear the doctor telling him that it will be five incisions. Two of those incisions will be removing limbs. You can see the equipment as it approaches near her head where it will remove something on her skin, another on the other side of her face, one below her right elbow removing her arm, and another removing her leg. In the waiting room there are people in military uniforms and one messed up looking father that doesn't know what to do. A doctor approaches him and lets him know that the operations went well. He can take her home in a few days.

It was her idea to sign up for the service. Only hers. The town was small and she couldn't see anyway out of it except to have Uncle Sam pay for her way out. She got to see some of the world as she was stationed. She sent home lots of pictures that her father shared with the neighbors and townspeople. He was proud of her, even though he wouldn't say it. Especially because he was scared of losing her the way he'd lost his wife. And all of his fears were realized when she was sent to Iraq.

It was a bomb, a shooting, chaos. In the chaos bullets killed two of her friends. She was hit like rain, everywhere they fell, pain shooting from places she'd forgotten she was the owner of. And now she wasn't.

She spent her time in bed. Through the fall, through the winter. Her father cooked and cleaned and tried to get her to talk but she wouldn't. When Spring came, it went unnoticed in their home. They shut the door to the town and the world.

But the world wouldn't hear it. The townspeople came and planted flowers and made a festival of flowers, right in their backyard. The father came out and finally, so did his daughter. Wrapped in a sheet that hid her missing limbs, she looked like a fairy and they dressed her so. They put flowers in her hair and flowers at her feet. She smiled for the first time and they remembered how beautiful she was, how much she looked like her mother. There was a pair of twins in the audience and though they were warned not to look at her, not to fall in love with her. They did just that.