Roses & Rope

part 1

Daisy Ashlyn Camslly was living in Philadelphia and attending meetings at the house of a one, Cullen Engle, when I first saw her. She wasn’t the tall, elegant, rich, snobby type, but she was beautiful and something about her struck me as mysteriously fantastic. Striking in her own right, might be a more accurate description.

In any case it was early on a Sunday morning at a time my father said no reasonable person should be awake. [I guess I never was reasonable or normal, at least  not buy my fathers standards, or anyone else’s for that matter]. My father, Deitrick Eirenger, never woke before nine on a Sunday morning. This left me with two to three hours of alone time, it was always a very boring three hours as I had nothing better to do than eat breakfast and stare out the window. 

On particularly blustery Autumn morning, as the sun was just shading the tops of the park trees in a rich gold and red, I saw her. Her long honey brown hair was twisted in a fishtail braid down the center of her back, a bright yellow lace hat barley holding back the bangs that attempted to sweep her left eye. She wore a long burgundy, red coat that went down to her knees. From this protruded two slender legs covered in black nylon. Her hands wore a pair of yellow gloves the same color as the hat on her head, in her right hand was a half eaten red delicious apple, that perfectly matched her coat. A larger apple I had not seen, not in the entire 12 years of my life. 

I decided that morning, for no particular reason, that she and I were going to be friends. She was different, like me, well not like me really, we were both different and that meant we were in the same boat. At the age of six I had contracted polio, my legs now seemed permanently twisted. I was tall for my age, my bones stuck out in abnormal knobby positions and my hair was always long and stringy. All the other kids made fun of me, I had once nocked Correy Daffin down and broken his nose and my leg at the same time. After that I was forbidden from playing from with the other children, and my own father hadn’t allowed me to participate in any recreation that even hinted of danger.

My mother had died when I was only 5 and my father had never been the same, though I knew little of his past I later realized that as a father and as a man he was merely protecting the last thing that meant anything.