The Girl With the Blue Eyes

It had been a sunny day when she left. The sun was slowly setting and the sky was a burnt orange when Kari was gone and the police were gone and her parents were gone. Audrey shut out the last light of the day and hated every sunny day after that one.
It was a sunny day when she lost her sister.

“Kari didn’t say where she was going?”

“Is she in trouble?”

“You’re very sure you don’t know where she is?”

“Is she okay?”

Officer Hill had soft brown eyes, older than the rest of her face. She took the child’s small fist and stroked it. “Kari isn’t in trouble.”

Her mother yelped.

“She’s in heaven, my darling.”

“Dead?”

The soft brown eyes closed in grief. The little girl on her father’s lap repeated herself, but this time, it was a confirmation.
She picked out occasional words and phrases – evil - from what Officer Hill was saying – bad men – but she was alone now, trying to hold onto the picture she had of Kari in her mind. It was slipping away from her, slipping away from her, sinking like the sun, casting twisted, distorted shadows on every memory she held.

Audrey lost her sibling, slowly, in pieces, as the bunk-bed they had shared since Audrey was a toddler was dismantled and fashioned into a double bed. She sidestepped the right side of the bed, where she could see her sister sleeping restlessly. That side of the bed was always made and always avoided, for fear of waking her. Kari’s clothes were not there to be missed. Her slippers, the ones she got for Christmas last year, were kept under Audrey’s pillow, safe from her mother’s purge of the house. Photographs were taken from their frames and put in a box. Kari’s name was rubbed off the calendar next to the fridge. The table had one less setting. Her blue toothbrush was missing from the mug in the bathroom.