Luna didn’t know why the nurse who'd entered the room left without a word and without doing anything, but the large woman was gone.

With a shrug, she went back to inspecting the room, searching for the few possessions she had left in the world. Everything else was burned to a crisp and gone with the wind and wasn’t that the name of a movie that looked boring as heck?

This room, she observed, did have a television, but somehow, she wasn’t interested in it. She didn’t feel like she’d ever want to watch it again.

So she kept looking and she didn’t know how long she looked before a bunch of people came into the room. They were frantic about life and mildly appeased to see that she wasn’t harmed before most of them ran back out and into the hall. One woman remained, not a nurse, and she was shouting her head off out the door.

“How long was she here alone for?! What the hell is wrong with you people!?”

Whatever this shit show was, Luna was glad that she had no part in it. Or so she thought, until the woman calmed down enough to introduce herself, awkwardly and still flushed with anger, as her aunt, related to the deceased Arizona as an older sister.

But Arizona was a state.

The woman was confused by her confusion but eventually explained that Pink’s real name was Arizona. Arizona Felder.

“I never knew that.”

Ant didn’t know how to react.

Luna knew a little bit about respect and she understood it to be important in keeping up appearances, which was why Pink insisted on it whenever they had to both stand before other people at the same time. So, she would call this woman ‘Ant’ because it sounded like Aunt, but she didn’t look like an aunt. She looked like an ant. Not that she was small, no, she was rather tall and big all over. Taller than Pink, who she would never be able to see as an ‘Arizona’, but not prettier. Red-brown hair was wispy and shoulder-length, her eyes a bit too small for her long face. Her nose was her best feature. All she had going for her, in Luna’s opinion.

She would have never made it as a prostitute, Luna thought. It was good that she didn’t want to try out the profession. She was married with a child, so it would have been a bit strange for her to run away from all that and live like Pink.

She wondered if Pink ever liked her life.

Even once.

As for Ant, she talked a lot once she got going, all about her husband and her daughter, who was older than Luna, and the house they lived in and the community groups she belonged to.

She tried not to say anything about Pink.

Ant had a pinched face. It looked like she’d sucked on a lemon and the taste was unforgettable to this day. Thin, pale lips in perpetual pout. And dry. Her lips were dry. Pink had chapstick in her purse.

Still, she could tell Ant wasn’t a bad person. She wasn’t coldhearted and while she didn’t want to talk about Pink, Luna knew why. Ant had watery blue eyes, but they got even waterier the few times she said something about ‘Arizona’ and Luna wondered what Pink was like before she was Pink.

The little said of her mother involved cremation and a burial that had already happened.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Your uncle will take you to the grave site,” Ant said as they left the hospital. Luna had her bag again and she held the strap with one hand, the other taken captive by Ant. “She has a nice headstone-” but she got choked up and while they were in the car, she didn’t say anything more.

The main things she spoke of while they waited on discharge papers were about the house they were going to and Luna’s new family. There was Ant herself, an uncle called Reginald, and a cousin who was five named Georgia. Uncle Reginald.

Ungle.

He worked at a software company called Pacific Systems Strategies and Ant didn’t know exactly what all he did, but he made a bundle and had good health insurance so their house was big enough that Luna would have her own room and they had no trouble getting her furniture all of a sudden.

Ant was mumbling to herself when they arrived at the house and it was bigger than any Luna had ever seen. Red brick and a Germanic aesthetic, white painted with brown siding cut vertical and slapped onto jutting peeks. A strange ye olde juxtaposition with the modern garage door. The home was grand, with two-story turrets on either side. There were pale steps from the sidewalk in front, and two ridiculously tall and thin trees framed the massive brown entrance door. Shrubbery lay in front of the wrought iron fencing.

They pulled into the garage.

All the houses on the road were similar in construction.

She guessed they were all people preparing to move on to space when the chance came.

The inside, though, was far from space-age. Instead, it brought the old-world style indoors. Tiny tiles on the floor of the kitchen and earthy tones in cream, green, and chocolate. Long blocks of dark wood ran along the ceiling and the countertops were sandstone. Pots of the same earthy colors held plants with huge, deep viridian leaves that were sure to be found in Jurassic Park. If she had any of those tiny plastic dinosaurs she’d seen in the dollar store, she would have made them live in the plants here, but Pink never bought her any toys which was fine because they would have died in the fire, too.

The kitchen, the room they entered from the door in the garage, was full of smells and the refrigerator was so silver. It didn’t match the rest of the décor at all. In fact, all of the appliances, the sink and stove, the microwave which was way. to. High. were points of contention in the space. Luna imagined they fought with the rest of everything as soon as the people were asleep, arguing their right to exist here because they provided needed functions while the others derided their appearance.

Well, at least they had each other.

“Here,” Ant handed over a cookie. “Your uncle will be home around five and Georgia will be back a little after two thirty. She’s in kindergarten this year, but you won’t start school yet.”

Ah. So, she was four.

“Instead, you’ll go to a preschool program!” She was trying to make it sound exciting, but Luna had the feeling it would be anything but.

If preschool was like children’s programming, then no way would it be any fun at all.

“I already know all my colors and letters and numbers and I can read fine thank you very much.”

Why did she feel like everyone blinked at her too slowly?

The cookie was fine, just like her reading ability, and she munched on it as she walked around the kitchen and into the room it connected to. The living room had a television, the biggest she’d ever seen, but as she stared at its black screen, she felt no desire to turn it on and that was because of Pink. If Pink wasn’t somewhere out there, then how could she watch TV?

Pink was gone.

The last bite of cookie hit the floor and shattered into crumbs as her vision grew blurred and swimming.

Pink was gone.

Pink who left but came back...

Wouldn't be coming back.

Small fists clenched the straps of the pink plastic backpack. This was all she had to remember Pink. This bag and the things inside it. The phone was smashed, the book was there, and other things that Pink must have put inside like her own real name and Luna’s too. Papers she didn’t want to read even though she could because she wasn’t a baby who needed to go to preschool.

Luna didn’t realize she was crying until Ant started crying too. The woman's white and floral blouse was soon soaked at the top of the right sleeve. All in all, no one would know how long they cried, not even them; Luna because it exhausted her so much that she fell asleep, Ant because once she laid Luna down, she kept crying for a good long while on her own back in the kitchen.