The Little Girl

Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She was a curious one –  always full of questions, wondering how engine of the train worked and how her Mommy drove the car and what lay beyond the sea and who was Graham Bell. Her curiosity delighted her Mummy and Daddy and they  got her a globe as a present.

“The world is yours. It’s not really that nice, but it’s yours, and you got to reign over it and make it a better place.” She was his little girl, after all.

The little girl played with the globe; she would pretend it’s a ball and she would toss it around, struggling to catch it with her tiny hands and getting furious with herself with every miss. She liked to think that she could do almost anything, and the world indeed, was hers. She would trace her fingers over the curve of the globe, all the way from where she lived to all the places she wanted to discover, and dream about their warm beaches and cool mountains.

Then one sunny day, over a childhood scuffle during a game of ‘catch-me-if-you-can’, the globe broke. Tsk! With innocent tears streaming down her cheeks, she had held her world in her soft hands and in that moment, a spell was cast over her. She resolved to fix the world – no monsters would kidnap young children in her world, no aliens with big guns would kill people, no child would be punished for pranks that they had not played, no would steal candies that were not theirs. Yes, her world would be happy. Humpty Dumpty would never fall from any wall, and no farmer’s wife would cut off the tails of the three blind mice. She would make sure that all the animals in the zoo would be invited to every child’s birthday – the Lion King, Tom & Jerry, the black crow and the fat elephant. And with that resolve, the little girl looked up at the sky to gaze at the stars, trying to lit her big, brown eyes with their brightness. And she remembered how her mother had taught her to do that; she’d cuddle her two little girls into her lap and feed them mashed potatoes or bananas and they would gaze at the stars, trying to listen to their stories.

One day, she would do exactly all of that and that, and then that would be her happily ever after.