Lillian, a 16 year old brunette with blue sparkling eyes was dancing with a friend in the school gymnasium. It was the grade 10 year end dance. At ten thirty the dance broke up and the young people started to leave the gym. Lillian was laughing and enjoying the conversation with her friends. At the top of the stairs leading to the parking lot she bid her friends a good bye and hugged them all. She waited there for her dad to arrive and pick her up.

A few minutes later he arrived and she ran down the stairs. She tripped on the last step and tumbled forward, her cell phone flying out of her hand. She instantly positioned them to block her fall.

Her father jumped out of the car and ran to her. She was lying on the ground motionless. Her knees and arms were bleeding. He picked her up and put her in the car and drove home.

Lillian lived on a 50 acre farm with her mother, father and 2 brothers. She was the oldest of the siblings and thus had the job of not only farm chores but also making sure that her brothers (twins age 12) did their fare share.

Lillian got up to start her day. As she sat up in bed her head hurt and she saw the bandages on her knees and arms. She went into her bathroom and removed the bandages from her arms and washed the dirt and some small pebbles away from the scabs formed over the cuts. Then she removed the bandages from her knees and washed the area. The wounds were scabbed over so she didn’t cover the areas with new bandages.

She put on her jeans and a brown T-shirt, fixed her hair in a pony-tail and put on a pair of socks, then her cowboy boots.

She went downstairs to the kitchen were she expected to see her parents and brothers already eating, and tell her to get ready for church.

“Oh! It’s Sunday,” she thought. “They didn’t want to wake me up.”

She went into the kitchen and cleaned up, taking the coffee pot from the stove and dumping the cold coffee from the night before into the sink.

She looked at the old windup clock on the wall-shelf. She liked to look at the worn brown wood sweeping around the now yellowed clock face with greying numbers. Years of being opened and wound up was taking its toll. It was 8 o’clock and she waited impatiently for the chimes to count out the hour.

She focussed her attention back to the vacant kitchen. A white lace tablecloth covered the large wood table, a bowl of plastic fruit acted as a center piece. She looked out the kitchen window and couldn’t see anyone in the yard. It would be another 2 hours before they returned home from church. That is if they didn’t stop to buy groceries.

She walked outside, the morning sun hot on her face. She went into the chicken coop to collect eggs. The normal clucking that she expected to hear as she entered was gone. The coop was empty and there were no eggs ...