A/N: Thank you so much for reading, please review so that I can make it better!
(If you find any typos tell me, and I will fix them.)
The Girl Who Noticed, and Remembered
When I was little, we moved to a house across from a park. My mom and I would walk over there almost every day that summer. She would sit and talk with her friends and I would play with mine. It was a plain park without much landscaping or anything fancy except for a statue of an angel. It had walking trails heading off from the statue in the middle of the park. They went all around town and through the forest next to the park.
My friends and I would usually play on the playground equipment a little ways from the statue. As I passed the angel each day to get to my friends, I would stop and stare. She was beautiful, and it seemed to me that every day, as I passed her I would notice something different from the day before. One day she would be smiling, the next she would wear a frown, and sometimes her face would be completely blank. But every day, her eyes were piercing. They shouldn't have been, they were made of stone, but for some reason it felt like she was staring into you. It felt like she could see who you were and all that you could be.
That year, the year I was 10, people started disappearing. People who were off on their own wandering through the park late at night or early in the morning would just vanish, never to be seen again. Sometimes I would watch from my bedroom window when someone would run by. As they were passing the angel, none of them stopped and stared like I did, they just kept running or walking their dog. Then, I would blink or turn away and poof, they were gone, leaving behind a cell phone or a frantic dog, lost without its master. I never knew where they went, and it never really bothered me.
Four years later, I got an art set for my birthday. It wasn't anything fancy, just some pencils and a sketch pad, but I loved it. I felt like one of the great artists, preserving the things I loved for all eternity between the pages of my little book. I would go around the house drawing everything I could see, and one day I was looking out my bedroom window and I saw someone running. It was a girl, not much older than me, she, like all the others, paid no attention to the angel she ran towards. As she knelt down to tie her shoe a little ways from the statue, I snatched my chance and ran to grab my sketch pad. I started on the face, to capture who she was before she was stolen away like they always were. I had her drawn from the waist up before I blinked and she was gone.
After that I drew all the people I saw pass through the park. There were people of every age, race, height, and weight, only some made it through, the angel was not one to discriminate. My sketch pad soon filled up, and I had to buy a new one. Hundreds of people disappeared right before my eyes, over the years all were documented, all were remembered in the pages of my sketch books.
After many years, I still didn't think about it, I just drew, then, a child was taken. He was about seven, with curly red hair and freckles. I didn't think to draw him, he was just a child, the angel wouldn't take him, it never did, but it just have been desperate, because I blinked, and he was gone. That was the first time I cried for them, the people who disappeared, I had never really thought about it as anything other than a part of life around here, and besides, I didn't need to cry, they were still there in the pages of my books. But this time, I forgot to draw him, and now a child was lost. Suddenly angry at the thing that was doing this, I stumbled out of my room and through my front door. With tears running down my face, I ran across the street. I didn't stop running until I reached the beautiful being in the middle of the park. I'm not really sure what I was planning on doing, maybe throwing something at it? But, when my feet stopped in front of the angel my knees gave out and I fell to the ground, sobbing. My hands tore at the sketch book in my hands, ripping out the pages, setting all those lost people free. My eyes wandered up to her face, her searching eyes. Then, staring into the face of an angel, I blinked.
