The Girl With The Pigtails

Time looked down on the little girl in the red gingham dress, pigtails swinging jauntily behind her as she skipped beside her mother, every inch of her spirit as careless and free as the birds in the sky.

Time didn't like this.

Time was a merciless dictator. No one was able to avoid his vice-like grip. Like a boa constrictor, he would always find a way to snake his way into the lives of his subjects, wrapping himself tighter and tighter around them until it was impossible to tell where they began and where Time ended.

And this little girl was no different.

So Time set to work.

Time smiled as he plucked the worn-down crayons from her dimpled hands, replacing it with ball point pens that the girl used to feverishly scribble her sixth essay that night, writing down words that she wasn't even sure she understood.

Time smirked as he took her juice boxes (no grape flavored, please) and set down a red solo cup in front of her, taking satisfaction from the uneasy look on her face as she ever so  s l o w l y  picked it up.

Time chuckled as he destroyed her princess dress that she always danced around in at night with her mother, swapping it with a no-nonsense pant suit, suitable for those long, tedious meetings that ten cups of coffee couldn't keep her awake for.

Time gloated as he banished her from the shiny red playground at school and dropped her into a dark, sweaty club, music pulsating as creep after creep came onto her, throwing out every crude pick-up line and rude gesture there was in the book in their pathetic attempts to get laid. 

Time grinned as he sent his friend Death to claim the girl's balding father, watching in glee as the girl's smile slowly disappeared and her beaming countenance began to wilt.

Time was relentless for years and years, never stopping in his constant battle he waged against the girl with the pigtails.

Now, there was one thing remaining that Time wanted, the final piece for his collection. What he wanted was more precious than all of the diamonds and pearls and rubies and sapphires in the whole world combined.

Time wanted her imagination.

Time wanted to take her technicolor thoughts and visions of knights in shining armor and fanciful tales of fairies and princesses and mermaids. He wanted them all to be his, his to lock up in his personal prison along with all of the other stolen thoughts he had accumulated throughout the years.

Time cracked his knuckles.

He looked down at the girl, hunched over that austere wooden desk in that little cubicle that she hated so much, and reached his hand towards her, his slender fingers feeling inside the contents of her head.

He was surprised to find that there was very little left to take. After years of tests and essays and grades and punishments and deaths, her imagination had managed to escape like wisps of steam into the vast sky. The rainbow within her head was now just a smudge, a miniscule thing that even a microscope might have missed.

But Time was selfish, and he wanted to finish what he started. So he plucked it right out of her head, like one would pluck an apple off a tree, and tucked it away in his pocket, never to be seen again.

Time was a merciless dictator.

And the little girl with the pigtails was gone.