Fantasy Flashes

The Ice Cream Man

I had a friend once, years ago, that loved the taste of strawberry ice cream. Not chocolate, not vanilla. Just strawberry. Now my friend wasn't a quiet girl like me, she was boisterous and self centred. The world revolved around her and her alone. To this day, I still don't know why she befriended me, if I can even call it that. Perhaps she saw me as her own little minion that would do whatever she wished. I was a scared seven year old, and I had no other friends.
But what we had wasn't friendship. No, rather what she had was domination over me. She was the apex predator and I was her prey.
But life was fine for a while, I had grown accustomed to her ways. How she would pull my pigtails if I looked at her in the wrong way or how she would always steal my chocolate bar from my lunch box. But this false sense of normality came crashing down on me when the ice cream man came to town. Naturally, he became a hero to all in my class, especially my friend. She became his favourite customer. He'd call her strawberry shortcake, for obvious reasons. It was like he was obsessed with her. Strawberry was his favourite flavour too, he'd say. She was getting so close to this strange man, but I suppose to us he wasn't strange. After all, everyone knew him.
And then one day, my friend stopped coming to school. I thought at first she was just sick or maybe she was even on holiday. But soon her face was plastered all over town, and that's when I knew she was really gone. The ice cream man still came around our streets, and even though I didn't really like ice cream, I decided to have one last cone to honour our friendship. But when it came to choosing a flavour, I couldn't decide between plain old vanilla, or the new flavour. Strawberry shortcake.