Unforgotten

4

SHE WAS FIVE.

The child was five when she lost it. Her innocence, the flower.

She couldn't even understand it back then, but she knew it was something bad – she knew that the man, the sick man, was a villain, a monster. And she knew that the things the man did weren't right. The naïve child understood it; she understood the look on the man's face, she understood the way the man touched her.

And she hated him, she was scared of him.

"Bubba, please don't leave."
She used to cry against her oldest brother's legs every time he left.

The little kid knew that whenever her brother was by her side nothing could hurt her, but whenever he left – everything, every shadow, every monster of the world found their way to the little child.

David was the worst monster. The sick man who sometimes placed his dirty hand on the kid's thigh, moved it up, all the way up to her lips. The man who loved to watch her every time she played, every time she did anything. Sometimes he even came to his room at night just to stare at her tiny little body.

But no one saw it – not even the little kid's soldier.

"You can play with David." They used to say to the little kid, not knowing that it was the worst thing to happen in the kid's life.

One day the five-year-old kid was left all alone with the man, the monster.

She couldn't remember much of it; her brain had done the job to make her forget all the trauma she suffered that day. Her brain had burned the images, at least tried to. But some of it the child was going to remember till the day she was dead.

The stupid naïve kid thought that if she was silent, deadly silent, the monster wouldn't find her – the monster wouldn't do anything bad.

She was wrong.

The monster did find her and that day the monster had something else in his mind – he had something sicker in his mind. A chuckle escaped his mouth as the little girl's ocean blue innocent eyes fell to his own dark and dirty ones. Her lower lip started to shake even though she knew that she had to be a brave girl, she wasn't allowed to cry at that moment.

She just couldn't stop it as hard as she tried to.

A horrified sob escaped the girl's mouth when a strong hand grabbed her from the floor and started dragging her tiny body to the living room. She was thrown to the couch like a rag doll.

"Keep it quiet, kid." The monster told her as another sob escaped the little girl's mouth.

The monster moved his face closer to the horrified kid, and he moaned as he placed his nose to her hair-
"Strawberries..."

His hand wiped the tears on the child's cheeks; he moved his hand against her tiny fragile body, until it touched the hem of her favorite dress. The monster raised the hem, and his cold hand touched the kid's stomach, making her shiver. He moved it lower and lower...

The little girl cried. It hurt, and it was not nice – the way the monster touched her, it was not nice. She wanted it to stop.