Happy Days

Maybe I knew you could do it (on Tuesday’s post), but I should have given myself a little more thought. I didn’t remember about the prompt until early Friday evening. And then I sat there simmering in the sweltering summer heat, trying to imagine “winter is long and extremely cold” and failing miserably.

So this morning I turned on the air conditioning and thought about it some more. Then I checked my email and Facebook (several times). Finally I convinced myself that empires were not going to rise and fall on my deathless prose, just start typing and be done with it.

Then I poured myself another coffee and did just that.

Word count: 500
Genre: Drama
Character: A child hater
Material: Not enough money
Sentence: "I'd like a day without punishing you."
Bonus: Winter is long and extremely cold.

The small, squat building was painted a pale pink, the happy colour at odds with what had gone on inside of it. The antiquated playground equipment lay abandoned, the swings hanging still, the monkey bars dusted with snow, the slide listing to one side. A half deflated ball nestled in the frozen sand box.

It had been a long and extremely cold winter, a fact the media reminded people of daily, but if it had not been for that, it might never have been discovered what was happening in that pretty pink building. But the boiler was old, like everything else, and working beyond its capacity. A pipe had burst and needed to be repaired.

Even so, it was by sheer accident the repairman stumbled upon the secret of Happy Days Daycare. He was declared a hero by the authorities. Who knows how far things might have gone if he hadn’t opened the wrong door?

The extreme cold of winter was forgotten as the story caught fire. It was the case everyone talked about – Sophie Fairchild, whom the press dubbed Satan Fairchild, an innocuous seeming woman with a heart of pure, black evil.

Pictures showed her to be short and slender, skin pale and smooth, mousey brown hair held off her face in a bun. She looked almost ordinary, until you looked into her eyes – dead eyes set in a face that never smiled.

The director of the day care facility cited the lack of funding as the reason why a better check of Ms. Fairchild’s credentials hadn’t been made in the first place, how things had gotten so out of hand. The center itself was part of a chain of daycare centers, all of which were currently closed pending the vetting of the other employees.

When the parents were asked if they’d ever had concerns about the day care, many of them shamefacedly admitted they had, but there were no other daycares available. Besides, things couldn’t be as bad as the children described. Ms. Fairchild might not be the warmest person around, but any time they had any contact with her she was unfailingly polite. It couldn’t be easy running a day care by herself. And children often exaggerate, right?

The families of the children involved in the incident were offered counseling. In fact, the number of caring counselors who volunteered for the opportunity to help was staggering, almost as staggering as the number of charges brought against Ms. Fairchild.

During the trial, Ms. Fairchild was asked what motivated her to act as she had against innocent children. She remained tight-lipped, as she had throughout her trial. Some believed her mind had snapped, that she wasn’t really there mentally.

In some respects they were right. When the judge handed down her sentence it wasn’t his voice she heard, but that of her mother. “Just once I’d like a day without punishing you.” Sophie was still waiting for that day.