What Surrounds Us

 Author's Note: I really worked with symbolism on this piece, so if you don't catch any you aren't looking hard enough.  I tried to focus on our world and how it's changing and while you can't totally shut yourself out from the world, you can make your own path and follow it too.


The smell of burgers and summer float around and lift the little girl up and surrounds her in the savory smells.  She is on a family picnic and as most kids, she is hungry.  So she abandons her flower picking to enjoy a delicious juicy burger. She sprints merrily to join her teenage brother and middle aged parents at the picnic table.  She squees merily as her mother sets a bright red paper plate filled with fruit and a burger and some fries.  She heartily digs in not noticing that her brother is preoccupied texting on his phone, her Dad is yelling angrily into his earpiece and that her mother is paging through her agenda on her ipad and rescheduling meetings and appointments.  There’s one thing this little girl does notice though, a small neon green cat with bright purple polka dots flying across the sky.  Her eyes become the size of dinner plates and she quickly tugs on her brothers shirt sleeve but he shrugs her off and continues tapping away at his phone keyboard, so she moves onto her father tapping hurriedly on his leg but he scoots away still aggravated, and in a last feeble attempt to point it out she goes up to her mother and starts pulling her arm towards where she saw the flying cat but she yanks it away and without another thought she goes back to sliding her finger across the screen.  The little girl is dismayed but she knows it happened and that’s all that counts for her.  What this little girl does not know is that the world she is growing up in is not a simple world.  It’s complex and hard to live in, and her innocence will ware off and one day she might be texting her friends or rescheduling her many dates or even shouting into an earpiece.  Her family is lost, but there’s still hope for her if she holds onto that flying cat and soars right up there with it.