Black Crayola Eyes

Milo Pol gave the knot a final yank and grunted as he stood up from his knees to stare down at the little girl.

He was huge. His dark eyes came down from the ceiling. They were so dark it would take both a brown and a black to get them right, and maybe not even the brown, maybe just the black, like totally smooshed to get them even close to the color they really were.

"I warned you, didn't I, Abigail?" he asked.

His eyes didn’t move. He didn’t move. Nothing moved. Sound stopped.

Abigail sat on the far-right side of the couch with her hands now wound in a black telephone cord. Her eyes didn't move either. Nothing about her moved. She was going to go on staring back for as long as it took; all night if she had to.

“This is no joke,” Milo Pol said. “No joke at all…”

Abigail wasn’t going to cry. She wasn't even close to crying. She was plenty scared, but she wasn’t going to cry and once she realized this, she took a little something out of her eyes. Anger maybe. Hatred maybe. Whatever it was, she let it go. She didn’t need it. Now she just stared back with eyes that said nothing.

She knew Silencio would be here soon. He wasn’t dead. He just looked dead lying on the road like that, but he wasn’t. Never underestimate Silencio. He’ll be here, and Milo will be real, real sorry when he comes!

“One more time and I’m going to stick you in a closet." he said. "Would you like that, Abigail? I don’t think you would like that.” He went on staring with his black Crayola eyes coming down from the ceiling.

Abigail continued to stare back at him. All night long, she was thinking. All night long if I have to.

“Okay,” the man named Milo Pol said in his loud voice. He walked away, quickly, like he’d won. Or like he’d given up.

Once he was gone, Abigail gazed over at the girl sitting on the other end of the couch. Her name was JoAnne. Abigail and Silencio had picked her up at the airport this afternoon. They were going to take her to see her father in prison before the car was stopped and Silencio was shot. She was old, thirty or something, but she looked like a little frightened girl now. Her eyes did. The room was warm, but she was shivering like she was Alaska or some place standing outside in the snow .

JoAnne took a nervous glance behind her to the kitchen, then scooted over next to Abigail.

“My name’s JoAnne,” she whispered. Her hands were not tied. She hadn’t tried to look out a window. She hadn’t moved from where Uncle Milo had told her to sit. She said nothing, just looked at Abigail with her frightened eyes and her mouth trembling.

“I’m not worried,” Abigail said. She leaned up to JoAnne’s ear. “Silencio is gonna come any moment.”

Tears now rolled down JoAnne's face. She shook her head no and went on shaking her head no as the tears rolled down one after the other.

“No, really!” Abigail said. She used both of her tied together hands to squeeze JoAnne’s arm. “He’ll come! Trust me.”

“They killed him.”

“He’s not dead. He’ll come.”

“How? They took his car!”

“He’ll come. He’ll take the bus or something.”

“He probably doesn’t know where we are. I mean, we’re in a damned Panamanian jungle! My god! Why did I come here? I'm so stupid!”

“You don’t know Silencio, JoAnne. If you did, you'd know he’ll come. He saved me and ten other girls from Uncle Milo before. We were in a jungle then too!”

“I heard the story,” JoAnne said. “My father helped him, really?”

“Oh, yeah. They saved us.”

"Reuben Rule?"

"Yes!"

“It doesn’t sound like my father,” JoAnne said. "And he’s in prison now, anyway.”

“He won’t be for long. There’s finally going to be a trial. I’m going to tell them what really happened. That’s why he took us, so I can’t test-o-fie.”

“All I know is--” JoAnne began.

Abigail shushed her. She looked to her right out at the darkness through the French doors. She saw movement and then heard a noise. She saw a dark figure dragging something along the patio. The black figure looked in the window and was gone again.

“Can we watch television?” Abigail called toward the kitchen.

“Go ahead,” Milo Pol said back.

Abigail rose from the couch and turned on the television. Then she turned it up louder-- way louder. There was a newscaster speaking in Spanish about something called Greenwheels. in Paris. She came back to sit on the couch.

Then they heard another sound, and another, and then another-- first a door being busted open, then a chair or something sliding across the kitchen floor, and finally a long drawn out scream of pain.

“Told’ja,” Abigail said.

--850 Words--