Collide Gamer

“What do you mean you don’t want to have your hair cut?” Mathilda asked her daughter. The mid-thirty women with short, brown hair was wearing clothes of incredibly good quality. Same could have been said for the furniture of their medium-sized home at the outskirts of Danzig. The scissor and comb she was holding also applied to the general theme of high quality items.

“I just don’t want it short!” Lydia, in her early tens, squeaked back and stomped on the floor. Her long hair wavered under the impact, and she whirled around to run away.

Her mother was very well aware of how stubborn the girl could be and hastily stepped in her way. “You don’t get to run away, young lady!” she announced.

“I don’t want you to keep cutting my hair; it’s embarrassing!” the normal girl announced with her hair of middle back length. “We have so much money, why don’t we go to the hairdresser?”

“Because we don’t have a lot of money, I HAD a lot of money, and now we have a lot of savings,” Mathilda berated her daughter while trying to coerce her towards their usual chair. “So now we conserve our savings until your father gets a better job than a chef at a low-class restaurant.”

“Why don’t you get some more money from wherever it came from?” Lydia wanted to know and hid behind the chair instead of sitting on it.

“Because it’s part of my family inheritance and that’s that; we aren’t talking about them anymore!” the housewife insisted. She never wanted to talk about her family, and it irked Lydia in no small part. “Now stand still, princess; you and I both know that you are going to run around like a tomboy again today and you are going to whine about leaves and branches getting stuck in it!”

“No!” Lydia disagreed just out of principle, as children tended to do when they were arguing with their evil, evil parents. “I will keep it long, and nothing is going to happen.”

Mathilda sighed, or perhaps it was a pained hiss, and stopped chasing her daughter. “Why do you want to keep it long anyway?”

“All the other girls have theirs long,” Lydia mumbled while staring at the floor, awaiting the typical mother’s comment.

“And if everyone is jumping off the bridge you are going to jump too?” There it was.

“I DON’T WANT MY HAIR CUT!” Lydia shouted and stomped again, and then something really unnatural happened. The scissor her mother had been holding flew right out of her hand, as if pushed by an invisible force. The twisting blades cut into Mathilda’s right thumb and then hit the floor with a series of bounces a few moments later as choking silence filled the room, drowning out the usual fight of mother and daughter.

Lydia stumbled backwards and then fell; she tried to get up and panically run from her mother who inspected her thumb for a moment, heading for the door. She just had to get past her mother and then she was outside. Of course, there was no logic to any of it; she had no idea what just happened or why or even how, but she felt like had to get away.

“You stay right here!” Mathilda did not share that idea and grabbed her by the neck of her clothes. Thusly stopped in a rather abrupt fashion, Lydia felt herself being picked up and then placed on the chair. Her mother’s unhurt hand was right in her face, index finger extended and her eyes crossed as they focused on it. “You will be sitting still and stay quiet for a few seconds; I need to get myself a bandage.”

She left the room, picked up the scissor and returned from the kitchen, where she kept her first aid stuff, not even a minute later. When she came back, Lydia had panicked tears streaming over her face.

“Aw, don’t cry, little princess,” Mathilda said, wiping her daughter’s tears away with a soft handkerchief. “That’s just a…” there was a pause, her mother never paused unless she was about to tell a stupid lie, “…my hand just slipped.”

Hands didn’t slip and cause scissors to fly around the room. Every child would know that. “But…” Lydia therefore wanted to speak up in denial of that.

“But what?” Mathilda interrupted her rather hastily; “You think you are magician, Lydia? That you got some sort of supernatural power? Try moving this then,” with a nervous look on her face, her mother held up the plastic comb. If asked like that, the hand slipping sounded more realistic. Especially since the comb didn’t move an inch.

“Okay, so your hand slipped,” Lydia sniffed, believing that with a child’s mind who just got done being lectured by her mom.

“Yup, now keep sitting there; if you won’t let me solve your hair problem through cutting it, we are going to solve it another way,” Mathilda announced. She combed her daughter’s hair and hummed a little song, making it seem like life was okay, before parting her hair into three strands and putting them together into one nice braid. “There, now you can go play.”

Lydia jumped off the chair and barely stopped to get into her shoes. “I am going now!” she shouted into the house, seeing a hand wave her goodbye. A hand with a thumb that was still bleeding. ‘Mom said she will be fine, so she will be fine,’ Lydia decided.

As she stormed through the streets, she had to admit that the braid was nice. It felt a bit heavy and foreign against the back of her head, but it also didn’t get in the way as much as her open hair.

She spent the next few hours doing what children on the verge of puberty do: running around the neighbourhood, finding some of her friends and gossiping or playing stupid games. It was always a bit weird for Lydia that she had to switch languages between home and everywhere else, but that’s just how that was.

However, eventually she got a call from her father and thus had to go to the hospital.

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“You have acute leukaemia, and it’s already advanced to a fatal point,” the doctor explained to Mathilda and the rest of the family of three with a sober but sorry expression on his face, the kind only doctors with years of experience in delivering bad news could make. “I am afraid that the chances of healing are… non-existent.”

“I see,” was all Mathilda said as everyone looked to her for guidance. Ivan, Lydia’s father, was as frozen as a deer in front of a car’s headlights, and Lydia couldn’t help but find herself be disappointed by this. She had always held her father in high regard, he was a man who could work hard and still crack jokes when tired, but now that he came face to face with a crisis, he seemed to crumble immediately. “We better not lose any time then, start whatever treatment you have.”

It didn’t work well.

Lydia’s happy life was eroded within just a few months. Her birthday came and passed, a hollow party organized by the mother of a friend. The unknowing girl was very well aware what was inevitably coming for them; she wasn’t that young anymore. She never would be as young again.

After the first month of treatment, her condition worsened to the point where she was barely awake anymore. It all hit so suddenly it just felt surreal. How could a human that was so lively just waste away so quickly? Her father lost his job another month later, never showing up to explain anything to his employer and instead sitting by his decaying wife’s side as he did nothing but watch the tragedy of life unfold before him.

“Listen to me,” Mathilda’s voice had grown very weak, but Lydia immediately picked it up in the otherwise quiet room.

“Yes?” She immediately hurried over to the bedside as her father asked that question. “What is it?”

“There is a pendant in my jewellery, in the shape of a key,” she whispered. “I want you to bury it with me. Never tell anyone else about it, nobody.”

Ivan looked at her with tears dwelling in his eyes, “Don’t be silly, you aren’t going to die.”

“I think it’s time you stop telling yourself that and start looking after our daughter,” Mathilda berated him; “You need to work for both of us. I know that’s cruel… but… that’s just…”

That’s just how fate played out sometimes.

She faded back into her hazy sleep and died a week thereafter. It was then that Ivan broke completely. Whether he wanted to act out his wife’s last wishes or not, he seemed to be unable to. It was Lydia who did most of the organizing for the funeral and thus found herself unable to invite her mother’s side of the family for it, while her father’s family had barely known her as they were on the other side of Poland.

It was Lydia who had to grab the pendant, a silver mixture of cross and key, and put it into the casket, and in the end, it was Lydia who had to stand next to a crying man on her mother’s grave, holding back her own tears.

They had buried her in a secluded graveyard at the local church.