The Lioness

Before. . .

“Cassie, I want you to know something. . . .something that you will take with you everywhere to always remember me by when the time comes, which won't be any time soon. But, just in case, I will tell you this now although you may not fully understand it at this time,” Mr. Hunkel, better known as my uncle Robert, who raised me since the day I was born, said to me, his gray speckled brown mustache twitching beneath his big nose.

Even a child of ten could tell something was amiss. My big round blue eyes stared back up at him as I sat on the floor below him, my head resting on his knee, taking in his every expression he was showing me.

“Although my judgments are almost always accurate, I may be wrong on this, but I can see a writer in you just like your mother and father and just as I am. Even now, you're eyes show that you're concentrating on my face. . . .perhaps deciphering what I'm thinking. I see you sometimes peeking in at the door to the shop with longing in those eyes of yours, watching as the machines work to print the paper of the upcoming newspaper for the next day. I know that look well since I myself was once like that, and so because of that I will tell you something that I have kept in the back of my mind since the day I'd heard it.

“ 'Write what you see, write what you hear, write what you know, but most importantly write what your heart feels'. These words have guided me throughout my whole career as a journalist and a newspaper printer, so I know they will have the same effect on you.”

There was a moment of silence as I pasted the words he had said onto the back and front of my mind. Somehow I knew that this was going to be the last words of importance who would say to me, which made me want to hug them close to my heart. We sat in that position for quite some time until the clock struck nine and he sent me scurrying up the stairs to my room, proclaiming it was long past my bed time.

I stopped at the top of the stairs, taking one last look at him as he sat in his favorite easy chair before the blazing fire, a scene that wasn't hard to come by on cold winter nights. I sketched every detail of this image of him into my mind before I went to bed because it was the one that most comforted me and I never wanted to forget it. Then I went to bed.

The next morning the sound of the rooster's cry awoke me, but there was something else that was missing. I rarely woke up when the rooster did. I was up a clear hour before the rooster was, so how and why did I wake up with the rooster? Then it dawned on me.

My feet scampered down the cold stairs, my beaten up old rabbit dragging behind me as I did so. I ran right through the living room into the kitchen where the first sign that something was wrong greeted me: nothing was cooking on the stove. This didn't stop me though. Maybe Uncle just forgot to heat up the pans this morning, it's happened before, my mind reasoned with the clues of something being wrong.

I pushed open the back screen door that lead to the space of lawn between the house and the shop where our clothes line was put up at. The second sign showed itself: there were no wet clothes hanging on the two old lines. There were only two days out of the week we didn't do wash and those were Saturdays and Sundays. Today was neither a Saturday or a Sunday; it was a Thursday.

Oh well, he's just being a bit forgetful today. It could happen to anyone, I told myself, my little brain trying to come up with more reasons of why he wasn't following the normal routine.

I rushed across the expanse of lawn between the shop and the house, blades of wet grass brushing against my bare feet as the purplish colored sky of dawn began to light up with the sun's brilliant rays. I stood on my tiptoes as my little fingers desperately reached for the round knob that would reveal the comforting printing presses.