Ellie wilted in the dying sunlight after seeing the bloody hatchet fall from my grasp. Taking her calloused hands into my own, Ellie’s pulse palpitated to the beat of anxiety. Although her body convulsed from agony, she possessed a face which was still so full of hope and naiveté for the world. It was her mother’s face, with its playful freckles, scraggly eyebrows, unassuming nose, and scars here and there. Looking upon the perfections and imperfections of my daughter’s face, I felt her confusion and fear.
As I cradled Ellie into my embrace, hues of salmon and periwinkle began to swim across the fall sky and a trove of oak trees swayed in peaceful silence watching their offspring drift off into the unknown. Scorned by the diseaseds’ annihilation of all souls, I was the grim reaper unprepared to end what last bit of life still trickled out of my daughter’s severed leg.
“Is it too late?”
Tears immediately seared within my eye sockets and rained upon Ellie’s soft face. Knowing the depth of her injuries tore at my heartstrings and I let out the primal yelp of a father laying his daughter to rest. All the while, she beamed at me with those eyes, those innocent and ever anticipating jewels. They began to glisten, in witnessing the birth of my perpetual anguish, and burned into my very soul.
“I can’t save you.”
Fully conscious of what was to transpire, I kissed my daughter one last time and planted her down within a pool of crimson. I watched Ellie fixed upon the muted beauty of nature in full breath; a zephyr reeled in buds of Aster and Sage which swirled above her spread-eagle figure while a lonesome rose fell upon her face as the bullet entered her brain.
