Scarlett O' Hara Hamilton never realized how much she hated the soldiers who had returned home. One by one, they crawled through the gates of Tara. Then they were all a bunch of stupid babies who ate and left their excrements everywhere on the red dirt. And they didn't even help out.
Tara. At five, she had walked hand in hand with Pa, simpering because she could. And she asked him.
"Pa, why does Tara have a name?"
"Why, Katie Scarlett? Tara is more than land," He knelt down and pointed over to the slaves working on the field, "Because it's a beautiful sight. Tara is your home and pride, Katie Scarlett, one day all this will be yours!"
But of course, those people she had to call her sisters came into her life.
Ugh. Tara. Now, it was so much of a burden.
"Why can't you put out enough? It's bad enough I had to get down on my hands and knees to do it but Pa, Pa who took care of you all your life like you were one of his children."
She looked down at the red dirt, expecting it to respond.
"I mean, yes, you've been burned and raped by those Yankees, but can't you try just a bit harder?"
And if she wasn't a lady and all, she was ready to degrade her to a piece of shit.
Again, she remained silent and Scarlett sat down, eyeing the ground as if she could set fire to it or she was expecting something to grow. She sighed and returned back in the house, never once looking back at the land.
She did return though. She returned years older and when she stepped on to land, it seemed to sting her and she asked.
"What, you ungrateful piece of dirt?" She eyed the infant plants growing with disdain.
Suellen came wandering out, arms filled with at least three babies. She sat through a dinner with her sister that night, smiling and thinking to herself, "More salt!" At night she wandered back outside and she lifted up that clay and maybe it was a hallucination but Tara said to her:
"Only want us when you don't have everything? You never appreciated me!"
"It would have never worked out." She allowed herself to say.
"Well, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn either."
And Scarlett O' Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler gasped, running back to her house.
A/N: ... IT's Cheerios!