Prompt: Write about saying goodbye (331 words)
The boxes were packed and waiting out in front of the house. The back of the truck was opened in a wide yawn, waiting for the boxes to be put inside.
Cali was in the woods, trying to prolong the inevitable for as long as she possibly could. Her treehouse had always been her place of safety. Not it was a sanctuary.
From where she stood at the window, she could see her parents moving in and out of the house along with the movers, coming out with hands full of knick knacks and trinkets and placing them in the pile to be put in the truck.
If she could spend the rest of her life in this treehouse, she would. She didn’t want to leave her house, her home.
Cali saw her mother stand and look around herself, obviously searching for her daughter. Cali ducked beneath the window.
There were markings in the wood, there. Initials. CR 4. CR 5. CR 6. CR 7. That was the last one. Cali remembered that she had stopped taking her measurements, but she couldn’t pinpoint the exact reason why she stopped. For some reason, at age eight, keeping a tally on her growth didn’t seem as pertinent to her as it once had. And now, at fifteen, it seemed even less important.
Cali lightly grazed her fingers over the markings, feeling the indentations and the prickly splinters in the wood. Whoever moved here was going to discover this treehouse and make their home here where Cali had already set her roots. Someone else was going to scratch in their initials and age and track their progression, and if that person had a sibling, then they would add their initials, and it would go on and on like that, endless, nameless people passing in and out of Cali’s house in a tree.
When the initials started to blur in her vision, Cali redirected her attention back out the window to check on her parents.
Allison Sobczak 