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Pretty Little Things

Ingrid Peabody guided a strand of wispy blonde hair behind her ear with thin, cream-colored fingers. The same gaunt hand reached down for a paintbrush and began to paint a powder blue on the roof of a miniature house, about an inch high. Ingrid’s slender frame was hunched over the small village she had been working on. Her muscles twitched when the resounding shriek of a telephone pierced through the silence she had been bathed in. Hesitantly, Ingrid picked up.

“Hello?”

“Ingrid?”

Ingrid sighed. It was her mother, as she had expected.

“Mmm-hmm…”

“I’m sorry, honey, but I have to stay late with Pansy at ballet today. She’s rehearsing that Baryshnikov solo again.”

Ingrid’s shoulders sunk.

“Dad will be home soon to make you dinner though.”

Ingrid slumped to the floor. Her father was a terrible cook and—without Pansy—dinner would be dull. Ingrid dropped the phone back in to the receiver. Ingrid lay on the floor with a horrid, hollow pain in her ribcage. She stared at the tiny village she had been creating. The little houses looked so warm and welcoming, with bits of glittery snow atop the roofs. She glanced out her own window—cold and blustery, as usual. Her neighborhood never seemed to be anything but brown or gray. Silence slowly crept back through the house and Ingrid immersed herself in frosting the panes of the windows of her wintry town.

Hearing her father pull into the driveway, Ingrid placed her miniatures back on the shelf, next to a small forest she had made the week before, complete with a mirrored lake and a swan. Behind that was a log cabin. To the left of that, an old-fashioned schoolhouse with miniscule children playing in the yard. The whole bookcase was filled with these dioramas, expertly crafted little scenes. Ingrid gazed longingly at them—they were so perfect, so interesting, so beautiful—unlike her life, which she found bland and depressing. Her mother was always off tending to Pansy, her perfect sister. Her father—an accountant—was boring to her, along with the fact that he was always nagging at her. School wasn’t any better. Ingrid was a wallflower, undoubtedly. She sat in the back of the classroom, friendless, and rarely raised her hand. She received good grades, but Pansy’s were always a few points higher, causing her to, yet again, be shoved aside to make room for her sister. She jerked her head up when the front door slammed.

“Hello!” her father called, almost demandingly. His tall frame clouded the door and his truffle-colored hair was slicked back against his head.

Ingrid took a deep breath and plodded down the stairs.

“Hey little girl,” he said, ruffling Ingrid’s hair. “No color today?”

Ingrid stared blankly at him, then down at her outfit—beige shirt, black skirt. She shook her head and pulled her hair back into a tight bun, a trick she had learned from Pansy.

Pansy and Ingrid were quite similar looking with their hair pulled back, but Pansy was the pretty sister with rosy cheeks, wavy chestnut hair, muscular legs, and an astoundingly graceful walk—head high, shoulders back, and toes (from years of ballet) instinctively pointed. Ingrid had a rather colorless face, nondescript pale hair, she was painfully thin, and slouched awkwardly.

“I found a new recipe,” Ingrid’s father stated excitedly, motioning towards two large shopping bags. Ingrid gave what she hoped was an inquisitive look. Her father accepted. “Fish with pineapple puree.”

Ingrid gagged. She hated fish, but her father was never around to take note. He spent all his time at the office and when he came home at night, he had some conference call to attend to or pages of information to file. When he spoke about his job, as he did when he and Ingrid sat at the dinner table, it seemed to her as if he was just listing numbers. It was as if her father was some sort of human machine, spewing out number after number. Ingrid looked at the table, two empty seats at the end—a recurring phenomenon at mealtimes.

Her father finished his description of his day and the pair returned an awful silence; a silence so depressing it brought tears to Ingrid’s eyes.

“The people in those houses,” Ingrid thought, “never have a quiet meal. They’re never as lonely as this.”

Ingrid swallowed a bite of her pineapple puree, and she felt the ground tremble. Her father’s brow furrowed.

“What is it, Daddy?”

“I think this is an earthquake.”

As if on cue, a bottle crashed from a shelf on to the floor. Drops of red wine, the bottle’s blood, spewed across the linoleum. Ingrid’s father grabbed her arm and hurried her down to the basement. There they huddled, in the dark storage room, tuning the radio. Her father’s fingers expertly twisted the knobs of the old contraption this way and that until the static noise vanished.

“Attention residents! We are experiencing yet another minor earthquake, but do not panic. The worst is already over and it will be safe to return to your business in just three short minutes. Continue with the procedures you used during the past earthquakes this year. If anyone you know is injured, please call the hospital immediately…”

Ingrid breathed a fat sigh, full with relief. Then, a wave of smashing sounds upstairs forced her to suck the breath back in. Her tiny worlds were up there—alone and unprotected. Ingrid’s shoulders tensed and her father grabbed her cold palm. Three minutes, they watched the clock together. The trembling came to a halt, and Ingrid fled upstairs in a watery, dream-like state. She could hear her father calling her back, but his voice dripped with mildness and she kept fleeing up the stairs.

Slowly, she opened the door to her room and her eyes burned with tears. All her precious towns, forests, lakes, had been crushed to a powder. Her thin frame crumpled over itself, and she too crashed to the ground. Among the colored fragments and shattered glass, she lulled herself to sleep with tears.

Ingrid awoke late the next morning and sobbed more. “All the beauty in my life is gone!” she cried. In an act of desperation, the fervently collected the large pieces of wood on the ground and attempted to place them back where they belonged. Clearly delusional with sadness, she abandoned her work and lay back down on the floor. She lay there for what seemed like hours, squeezing her eyes shut. Her heart throbbed and chest heaved a bit less each hour, until, finally, she opened her eyes. Still, she let her aching body remain on the ground. Her limbs were so heavy with melancholy that she couldn’t bear to lift them. Making those miniatures had been the one and only thing she took pleasure in. Ingrid had spent countless, meticulous hours perfecting her worlds, and they had been destroyed in seconds. Her most precious, prized possessions had been brutally massacred.

There was a knock at the door. It was Pansy.

“Ingrid, breakfast is ready!”

It took all of Ingrid’s strength to move her lips and her voice fluttered out in a raspy whisper.

“I don’t want any.”

“Come on,” said Pansy lovingly. “You really need to eat something.”

“No,” Ingrid declared, but Pansy entered the room and lifted Ingrid from the floor. Ingrid diligently followed Pansy to the kitchen. Ingrid realized she was incredibly hungry and had eaten four pieces of toast and a bowl of strawberries with cream before she was satiated. The food was delicious, but it sat heavily in her stomach, which churned until she thought she would be sick.

Days passed like this. Ingrid treaded around with a leaden heart and everything seemed hideous without her shelf of beauty. Until, one early evening, something caught Ingrid’s eye—a large red fire hydrant with pink trim. Ingrid swiftly walked over and knelt down in front of it. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Someone had taken the time to delicately paint pale pink outlines around the fire hydrant and she had never even glanced upon it, despite the fact she walked past it on her way home almost every afternoon. Looking upon this fire hydrant made Ingrid so pleased that she broke out in to a smile—a shy one, but nonetheless it was an honest smile. She had found something gorgeous, stunning, and even radiant in her own world. It was much more beautiful then anything she had made in her miniature world, because it was real. Opening the door to her house and giving the fire hydrant one last glance, she noted yet another beautiful thing—the shutters on the front of her house cast the light about in such a wonderful way, like slicing into a fried egg, but with the sky. By this time, a full-on grin had consumed Ingrid’s delicate face. She sat down at the table and her mother strode over, brown curls bobbing and dipped in to kiss Ingrid’s cheek, a gesture Ingrid had never taken note of. As her mother rose, Ingrid took in one last little beauty. She caught a whiff of her mother’s perfume—it was deliciously musty, like a teabag from an old box in an attic, spicy, yet familiar. Ingrid closed her eyes in sheer ecstasy; all this rich, vibrant prettiness that surrounded her which she had been too naïve to notice. These tangible little beauties that already existed, she didn’t have to painstakingly craft them, only notice them.

The next day, Ingrid noted how kind Pansy was to her, how she had helped Ingrid sweep up all the broken glass and splintered wood. Ingrid had taken several deep breaths and shed a few more tears before she allowed her shattered dioramas to plunge in to the garbage bin. There was no way she could remake all of them, and they distracted her from the loveliness of her own life, so she vowed to refrain from making more miniature scenes. This burden lifted from her shoulders, Ingrid walked, rather danced, away from the garbage bin and perched upon her front stairs. There she sat, watching her world. A golden-brown dog led by a giggling little girl, two birds nested upon a telephone wire, and at the end of the block, a red and pink fire hydrant. From then on, hardly a day would pass when Ingrid would not walk by the fire hydrant without feeling a touch happier. She no longer tried to create beauty; she found beauty.

The sky was gray and dead leaves scratched at her face, but Ingrid stared down at her new shoes, red with pink trim, and smiled—what pretty little things they were.