Already Lucky
Rose Smith noticed everything. The way her father had gone quiet at dinner. The way her mother had stopped looking at him over the breakfast table. The small grey weather that started up inside the house when nobody was speaking. Rose was the kind of child who carried Ribbons everywhere, because Ribbons was a stuffed rabbit and Ribbons did not have to be brave. Then one afternoon a woman Rose had never seen smiled at her in a playground, and the grey weather inside her parents' house became the least wrong thing in Rose's life.
Rose Smith was born into a house full of music. Her father at the piano in the mornings. Her mother in the dance studio in the afternoons. The Kelpie under the kitchen table. The older brother she idolised, who pretended not to notice. From the start, Rose moved through all of it like a small person who already knew she was lucky.
She held funerals for goldfish and kept jars of injured insects on the windowsill. She wanted to be a vet, and she had the kind of seriousness about it that made grown-ups smile at each other over her head. Ribbons went everywhere. Ribbons was a stuffed rabbit, and Ribbons did not have to be brave, which Rose thought was very lucky for Ribbons.
But Rose noticed things. The way her father played the piano less. The way her mother stopped mid-sentence when Rose walked into the room. A slow grey weather between them she had no word for.
Nobody explained any of it. Not the silences. Not the woman who smiled at her in a playground far from home. Not the red dust she had no name for, or what she was doing standing in it.
And nobody, in the end, explained the bullet.
