little girl unnamed.

when she was a child, long ago, she had pigtails in her hair. and though she never really liked them, she kept them there because her mother tied them up for her one last time before her mother died. i remember when i saw her, long ago, at her mother's funeral. she still had those pigtails, tied by her mother, in her messy hair. they were short little pigtails, since her hair had started to slip out of the rubber bands.

her mother never had much money. they had been vegetarians, though not by choice. in the summer, celery was the cheapest in the market, and in the winter, broccoli. each bunch of vegetables was always bound together with rubber bands, and that's why she had so many rubber bands around the house. she wore them like bracelets: rusty reds, fleshy peaches, dull purples and bruised greens, all bunched together at her tiny wrist.

her mother had always wanted her to leave her hair to grow to a nice girl's length, but she never wanted hair past her shoulders. she started to chop her own hair every now and then with a pair of scissors, surviving the accidental cuts with an indifferent face. her mother gave up dreams of being able to braid her hair like the most fashionable dolls' hairdo, but still found a light joy in tying those pigtails up.

she never played with us. we thought she either didn't like us, or really liked to stay home with her mother. we never saw her with anyone but her mother. we never saw her father. at that age, we didn't know how it all worked, so we just thought she didn't have a father. well, it turned out that she did have a father, and his name was Greg Furles.

i saw Mr. Furles at the funeral that day, and nobody knew who he was, not even his own daughter. it was a small funeral, maybe twenty or so folks, but Mr. Furle didn't sit anywhere near his daughter. she looked at her mother's body the entire time, until they lowered her into the ground. i saw that when they started shoveling the dirt in, one of her pigtail rubber bands fell off somewhere into the dirt. that was the only time i saw her gaze move. it had started raining then, and i couldn't tell if her eyes were getting teary, or just watery from the sky's tears.

anyway, we don't know what happened to her. we just know that her father took her away a day after the service, after throwing out what little furniture they had in that little apartment out by the curb. the day after she left, we saw her rubber band collection scattered on her mother's grave. well, i guess Mr. Furles made her throw them all away, too, and i guess she couldn't bear to do it, so she gave them to her mother to keep.