Massacre at Heber

Massacre at Heber @aladreth antoinette brown, previously published


The little girl was perfect in every way.  Why, she was just a little girl and truth be told, all little girls are perfect.

The little girl's mother was also perfect.

The little girl's father was perfect in his own way.

The little girl's mother made sure the little girl knew how to read and write way before everyone else her age. She also made sure she wore the most perfect clothes and went to all the most perfect places, joined the most perfect groups, and got in to the special gifted and talented classes.  The little girl's mother also made damn sure no one would suspect they were poor, even if she had to recycle and re-purpose every known item to man.

It was perfect.

The little girl's father liked to drink one glass of beer every Saturday night.  He liked it in a frosty big rimmed pedestal glass that had been frozen in the freezer for exactly 45 minutes.  He liked great food too.  Man's food; enchiladas, chili, cornbread, tuna casseroles, creamed spinach, and fried salmon patties.

It was all perfect to him.

The little girl's mother didn't think any of it was perfect even though she cooked and served the little girl's father so she nagged the father.  He called her a 'Bitch.' He was caught in a perfect world that wasn't so perfect and he gained one hundred pounds.

The little girl still thought her father was perfect.

The little girl drew and painted.  She didn't think her pictures were perfect enough so she would tear around the parts that were perfect and hold on to them.  One day she would make collage, she thought.  A collage of all of the most perfect parts of her work.

The most recent thing she tore out of a painting was a pink and blue spotted fish.  It was perfect.  The rest of the painting was not perfect so she crumpled it up and threw it on the burn pile outside.

The little girl had plenty of imagination.  One day she believed she saw a ghost in her bathroom.  It was a red-headed woman caught on the toilet. The red-headed ghost was alarmed and the little girl was too.  But, the little girl liked being a tad bit scared.  It broke up the monotony of being perfect.

The little girl also liked to write.  One day she wrote a great comedy of all of the weapons she could think of talking to each other.  She found pictures of power tools from the Sears catalog and cut them out and glued them above each weapon.  The weapons were threatening to beat up all the other weapons above or below them. "I'll kick your ass from here to Mexico," the saber saw said.  It was a vicious circle of weapons all threatening the other weapons.  It took hours to create.  Her mother didn't think it was so perfect.  The little girl loved it.

The little girl had a friend named Charlie.  Charlie was not a little boy as you might assume by the name, but was a little girl like herself but not perfect like herself because Charlie was bossy and might as well been a boy.  She had boy tendencies, as her mother would say, and she was a lot bigger than the perfect little girl so she ended up making a lot of the decisions in their friendship.  Charlie decided they would go to the forest and pretend to be witches.  They would dig in the forest for treasure.  It was perfect.  But, if the little girl got too dirty then the little girl's mother would freak out.

You just can't keep kids from getting dirty so the little girl's mother would freak out a lot.

Charlie's parents were photographers.  They had lots of talent according to what the little girl had heard around school.  They took lots of pictures of the children at school and went on field trips with them to photograph the wild flowers.  She liked them because they didn't work really hard and reminded her of hippies.  She also liked John's parents because they were authors who slept all day.  John was fun to play with but he was certainly not perfect.  He had ideas in his head that were all too messed up.

Whenever John and the little girl played together they would get in to a lot of trouble hiding places in the bathroom to catch other little girls peeing and dressing up in Big Foot costumes and chasing other little girls away with shotguns that had the working parts removed from them.

They would play jailer and prisoner and the prisoner would always get away and go over to John's parents house and steal stuff while John's parents were sleeping. Mainly it was Twinkies they stole, but sometimes John's father's watch would end up in their play things as well.  John's parents never seemed to freak out.  "Kids will be kids," they would say and they talked about how the little girl and John had such good imagination and were creative and would probably both grow up to be great authors like themselves.

The little girl's mother was growing weary trying to keep up with all the friends the little girl had and none of them were quite right or, you guessed it; perfect.

Even the little girl started to think maybe Charlie wasn't perfect enough to play with. Maybe she should dump Charlie.  John was full of so many ideas that the little girl was just eating up, sucking down and spitting back out in different forms that she couldn't give up John.  Anyway, her father loved John and would give him baseball hats and talk to him about little boy things such as sports, cars and hunting alligators and the little girl liked to make her father happy.  He seemed happy the little girl was playing with John.  Her father liked it when she played baseball and little boy's sports.  So, she dumped Charlie.

Charlie's parents weren't aware of it but they took the last photo of Charlie and the little girl together right in front of a big old Elephant Ear plant.  They were were smiling really big in the photo.  The little girl was perfect.  Charlie had stringy hair and a tooth missing.

Something bad happened to Charlie and her parents after that.  They were all killed according to what the little girl was told.  It was bloody people said.  She didn't fully understand it. She didn't know if it was like when she would play dead for twenty minutes at a time laying flat on the cement staring at the sun to see if would make her go blind like her perfect mother said.  Or was it more like when a doberman tore through a wire pen and ate all her baby chickens and baby rabbits. That was a bloody mess she came home to after school one day.  Feathers and fur everywhere!

All the little girl knew was it was a 'Massacre' because that is what everyone said.

It was a sad day.  Even more sad, there seemed to be other people who were 'massacred.'  The people up on the hill who kept a pet tiger, they were all gone and their house was 'violated' the little girl heard.

The little girl started to feel guilty.  What if she would have never dumped Charlie as her friend?  What if Charlie would have been at her house the night the man had come in to kill her and her family?

She started thinking she could have saved Charlie but because she was a 'Bitch' like her mother she didn't. She loved her father so much and he was more than right about her mother most of the time.  But, what about her?  Was she still perfect?

One day not too long after the girl was thinking all of this, the little girl came home from school and found a man in a grayish-brown suit swinging on her swing set in the back yard.  He was sort of lolly-gagging.  That was a word her mother used. "Stop lolly-gagging," She would say.  Well, the little girl wasn't sure what it meant, but she thought the man was doing it.

She came within ten feet of the man and asked him who he was. He said, "Well, I'm the man who has been killing people here in town."

The little girl stood perfectly still with her hands behind her back. She could run but he would chase her.  He was tall and had far longer legs than she did, plus she had long hair and he could reach out and grab it.  She was smart enough to know that.

Maybe she could talk him out of his wicked ways.  She was always told she was perfect and in her eight year old brain, she practiced a lot of psychology.  She thought a lot about things.  She had analyzed a lot of situations by herself.  Any man in a three piece suit couldn't be all bad.

He didn't look like a killer.  He didn't look like someone who would have killed Charlie.

He smiled.  He had perfect teeth.  More proof something didn't fit.  A killer would certainly have crooked teeth or one tooth missing right in the front.  No, the killer had perfect teeth.  Straight and really shiny white.

"Do you like fried salmon patties?"  She asked him.

"Quite right I do," he replied, twisting around in the swing, back and forth, twirling the top chains around each other with his perfectly polished alligator skin shoes.

The perfect little girl might not have been able to save Charlie, but she would save the killer man in the nice suit.

She took a couple of steps forward and reached out her hand, "Well, you might like to join us for dinner then."