AN: Short piece written during class. Prompt was write about some ordinary object and make it have some connection to the worst experience in someone's life. I chose some little plot of land in the courtyard of our school. It worked, I guess.
The man felt so numb. How was it possible? Why did it have to happen? He stared at the ground, soil freshly replaced and covered with hay so the grass would grow back. He snorted harshly. She wasn't going to be coming back.
It wasn't her final resting place. They had moved her somewhere else, to a place that had a plaque and an inscription that told just enough about her to leave any old onlooker satisfied. But not him. It wasn't enough. He wanted her back. He wanted to run his fingers through his little girl's hair again, like he used to do when she was younger and got scared of her nightmares...
Since when was she so brave, so confident, so headstrong? Since when was she getting herself into trouble that wasn't even her own? And to find her body here like that, with the soil ever so gently covering her like sheets on a bed... to find her here with wet fallen leaves sticking to her like she was some damn piece of art in a museum...
A broken neck, that's all he was told. A simple "I'm sorry for your loss" from the investigators. That wasn't enough. It wouldn't bring her back. And her killers - that damn organization - were behind bars and detained at last, were sentenced to how many consecutive life sentences each. Some were even given the death penalty. But how could that ever even start to make up for what he had lost? How could that be enough? He could still feel the fresh blood on her, leaking out of her like she was a broken, rusty faucet. Her coarse hair spattered with mud and littered with twigs. Her deep blue lips that finally matched her eyes.
She wasn't supposed to be like this.
A simple broken neck. Something about that just didn't seem right, in his mind. It didn't feel real. She couldn't break her neck. That couldn't be how it happened. It... it didn't give him closure. None at all. And that was really something that he needed right now.
First his wife. It was pneumonia, a bad case that went even worse. Nobody to blame that for. Even the doctors he knew did all they could. But he had been fine with that when it had happened. He had been fine before. But now was different. Now, now somebody - his little girl - was harshly, was so suddenly taken away from him. No warning. No hint. Only the organization left, that organization in jail. Not enough.
He stood up from the ground and brushed the knees of his pants off. Not enough. The dirt fluttered to the yard, the last remaining bits of her being discarded. He stared at the square, the not-grave that would eventually return to normal and hide the atrocities that had been buried and dug-up there.
Never enough.