Haszie's Christmas Gift (Part Four)

haszie's christmas gift

Part Four

By Delfin

After dinner, she crept up to her room, and waited.  She was waiting for the perfect moment when the house would grow silent; no pesky siblings to entertain, no boring chores to complete, no searching questions about school work from Papa - gosh, the list could go on and on and on!  You had to be saint to live in this house!

Her ears strained to hear the slightest sound.  No, the house was asleep; you could hear even a pin fall in this silence.  She could feel the growing excitement as her heart thumped hard against her chest.  She retrieved the comet-jewel from the bedside drawer where she had left it the day before.  She trained her table lamp onto the comet-jewel.  Was there something wrong with her eyesight?  There were more of the brown, mouldy dots.  Her heart sank and she stared at it, almost in shock.

The jewel had lost its shine.  This cannot happen.  She tried to recollect.  Did she drop it somewhere again?  Was one of her scarves on which she had left it in the drawer dirty?  She hadn't cleaned her room in ages though her Mama had been pestering her to do so for sometime now.  That must be it!  Her drawer had polluted her precious comet-jewel!  She wished she had listened to her Mama and kept her room clean and tidy.

Anyway, that must be it.  Just some dust that had enveloped her comet-jewel.  She will start her cleaning now; she will start with the comet-jewel.  She grabbed a clean handkerchief that was lying on her laundry basket filled with washed, unfolded clothes.  She began to rub the jewel, first, slowly, with gentle circular movements.  Then, as the moulds remained, her actions became more vigorous.  In a heart-stopping moment, she realised that the spots weren't going away, clinging stubbornly to the jewel as though they were fused onto it.  Her eyes welled up and her vision blurred.

Surely, The Father couldn't have cheated her!  There must have been a mistake of some kind! Surely... no... there must have been a mistake.  She reached for the box which she had flung into the waste-paper basket after removing the comet-jewel from it the day before.

She examined the box carefully.  No clue on the exterior of the plain mauve box.  She lifted the top and looked inside the box.  What was that?  On the bottom, there was a note printed on a cream-coloured petal.  In her excitement, she had eyes only for the comet-jewel; the plain box was a non-entity.  With shaky hands, she carefully dislodged the petal from its haven and placed it on the reader.  The translation read,

And that is the end of the short story, `Haszie's Christmas Gift.

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