wendy // {d10/fin}

Grains of sand shift along the finger etching among it, getting barely scraped between the nails bitten to the quick and the stubs that matched her mother's. Like luxury bed sheets, the sand lining the pig pen smoothed across the rough bits of hand as she scrawls boxes into it deep enough to reveal the dirt underneath. Loose letters stain the air around the matted pale blonde strands stand on end like a crowd in applause, jumbled words played at her thick upper lip requesting a slot somewhere on the ground, (axomatic wanting to lay across from recruescence by their matching c's in her mind) yet letters scuffled awkwardly out of place, with angram meeting up with precipituos at the r's one box short.

The tips of her fingers camouflaged with the ground as they danced across the sand, forming grainy squares making up a make shift crossword puzzle that met the random dimensions in her head - a row of eight meeting halfway with a column of thirteen boxes in a row, hell if she failed to fill it with a word however. Often the haphazardly pattern of squares were left uncompleted with her mouth soaking with bitter words, as she dug for something else to entertain her out the secondhand burlap usually clinging onto her back.

Hallow airs fills the ears too large for her body nuances with the chirps from the pigs next to her, (as a kid, she called them chubbies instead, because calling them pigs felt rude, despite what her father said) their portly cheeks matching her's like genetics. Like clockwork, the squat fingernails notched letters carelessly into the surface, the words coalescing into one another clumsily, (exbrance meeting up with referentility, even with the words being spelled wrong) with only a single column left blank. The letters her father taught her as a child scratched at her wide forehead to fill the missing blanks of the pillar of boxes (--e-ol-s), red rushed to her permanently flushed, rotund cheeks in a sense of frustration. Crooked teeth struck against her thumb nail in an attempt of focusing, the taste of sand and sweat coated her tongue along with.

Chewing her nails down to the quick came like second nature to Wendy, often filing them down until crimson fell into her mouth. It was one in an array of habits she mimicked from her father, like the slurs accompanying her words, her self imposed cruciverbalist status and the hours wasted color coordinating sentences in books with broken crayons. Parts coated in green meant despair, because green was the color of toads, which she loathed with her being; words licked in pink meant happiness, because pink was the color her father told her her cheeks were, (straining her eyes in attempts to see them herself failed each time) and so were the pigs the Nobless family treated. Except, most of the colors' definitions have been swapped, as her nostalgic embarrassment of something so sappy left her blue.

From then on, words highlighted in green meant they were pivotal, such as the ones Aviva Williams left on the right hand corner of one of her papers. Pink was exiled, because the boys at school said it was only by little girls and Wendy felt anything but. On the other hand, blue clouded words she later wrote on scraps of loose paper and held captive in her pants' pocket or the dingy burlap sack she held onto, because they were the lines she etched into the sand in her free time outside the pig pen. Oddments still reside in the bottom of the bag hugging to her back, crumbled under different books and boxes of loose ends, their existence usually forgotten about for periods of time ("bestroy what destroys you" still lingering after months, torn almost in two).

Riddled with a potent frustration, the calloused hands smooth the crosswords back into nonexistance and wipe the rest of the grit onto her preloved shirt two sizes too big. Save for constant snorts from the walking blubber bordered by the fence, the only noise coating them was the exhales through her sharp flailing nostrils. The names of each pig ran through her mind during her constant glare at them, (Penelope, Fey, Dog, Charlotte, Rhyme) her father labeled the majority of them; some were random, some after family, one Dahlia, after Wendy's mother, which she take offense of for weeks. Pig Dahlia grew on her after a while, but Wendy spent the entire time snickering under her breath.

Like a photocopy, the both of them held grudges like memories, a single insult staining on their mind with a fresh sting. Until the last breath of Dahlia Nobless, the rest were wasted attempting to mold Wendy into her form of a daughter, or at least one who lavished in things other than colored sticky notes and had more friends than a few pigs. Every day her father thought Dahlia's last day was that one, Wendy tried to paint the walls with pink sticky notes, because pink was the color of her cheeks, and it was the color of happiness that coated her life in a corny embarrassment like both her parents did.

With cooling nerves, her hands wrapped around the rickety wooden fence a few inches shorter than her, each pig stumbling about unaware of anything, bare a few occupied by food laying in the corner. Most wallowing in either mud or sun, or ambling aimlessly like Wendy's train of thought, debating procrastinating longer or finishing something other than a crossword puzzle scribbled across her mind.