A short story influenced by a one word prompt

Sleep was sacred to her. And so her bedroom became a temple and her bed the altar. Each morning for Charlotte began with a quiet simple prayer, followed by another religious act of making her bed. She knew she was odd for being one of the only sixteen year olds who genuinely liked making their bed and didn’t consider it a chore on a list or a demand from a parent. She simply liked starting her day with one small successful act. The rest of the day could completely fall apart and she could at least rely on coming home to some sense of calm and order in the form of smoothed sheets and perfectly placed pillows.

Charlotte had experienced her fair share of days that fell apart. And perhaps that is why she made her bed every morning. Perhaps a small part of her knew that something bad would happen every day for the majority of her life. She wasn’t a pessimist, just a realist. Bad things had happened in her life, things no kid should ever have to deal with at such a young age. But she also knew that there was good in every day as well. Charlotte saw the balance of both, and she knew the scales moved much like the seesaw she loved to play on during recess as a child.

It was childhood memories like the old yellow and blue tarnished seesaw that often consumed Charlotte’s thoughts as she rode the bus to and from school. Blurry visions of the neighborhood rushing past her window made old memories rush through her head.

On this morning’s commute to school, she noticed a plump brown and white spotted rabbit standing by the hedges of the house on the corner as the bus rolled to a stop to welcome new passengers. The rabbit sat up straight, his ears alert and listening to the hiss of the school bus doors open and shut.

As the bus slowly rolled away, the rabbit turned and scampered back into the bushes toward the house, almost as if he had watched his human get safely on the bus for school and could return to his normal rabbit life. It was this thought that made her think of one of her favorite books as a kid, The Velveteen Rabbit.

The first time she saw the cover of the book was Christmas morning, delicately displayed by the hearth of the fireplace as if left by Santa. As a book lover from a young age, Charlotte gravitated to the book, grabbed it, and immediately sat in her dad’s lap, handing him the book and delaying opening the rest of the Christmas gifts until they had finished storytime first. The Velveteen Rabbit quickly became a bedtime favorite, and the idea of toys coming to life sparked a new love in her heart for her stuffed animals.

Charlotte’s infatuation with this childhood classic inspired another gift that appeared a few months later in her Easter basket. A small brown and white plush rabbit sat in the middle of a white wicker basket surrounded by chocolates, and for the longest time that toy never left her side. He went on every car ride, he was part of every make believe adventure, and he fell asleep with her after storytime every night.

She had loved that stuffed bunny more than any other stuffed animal she had, hoping that her love would bring the plush toy to life. She still had the bunny sitting on the top shelf of her closet now, more than ten years later. While the magic of Santa and stories about toys becoming real had worn off, she never could bring herself to throw away the rabbit, despite the fact that he was more worn and torn than any of her other stuffed animals. Now, he lived on the closet shelf with two kittens, one with all black fur and one all white, and a plush pup named Shadow.

These relics of her past lived in the quiet of Charlotte’s closet because she felt as if she was too old to still keep these toys displayed on her bed. She was sixteen now. She was supposed to care more about driving and makeup than stuffed animals and books. And so she tucked those things away, never completely removing them from her life -- just removing them from the public eye.

Charlotte’s eyes readjust to the world around her, and she is back on the bus on her way to school. She had been doing that quite often, getting lost in a daydream while her eyes glaze over in thought. Her best friends were used to this and never seemed fazed by her daydreams, but they both had their own cars they drove to school and had no need for the bus. Charlotte was one of the oldest students who still rode the bus, and she was fine with that. It would take her a lot of courage to get behind the wheel of a car after what happened to her father. As long as public transportation was offered to her, she would take it. So she got off the bus that morning knowing that her school day would end the same way it began, just moving in the different direction.

The school day was just like any other. It was so routine that when she heard the three o’clock bell ring, she felt as if she had been on autopilot all day. She couldn’t remember what she ate for lunch, but she knew she had eaten because her stomach didn’t rumble. She couldn’t remember what homework she was assigned, but she knew she must have had a moderate amount based on the weight of her backpack as she headed toward the bus. And she knew she must have talked to Michelle and Eric that day because they smiled and waved as they all went their separate ways for the afternoon, no sense of concern or tension in their eyes.

Charlotte shrugged off the groggy feeling as she loaded back onto the bus for the second time that day and looked on the bright side of being able to quickly mark another day of school off of the calendar. It wasn’t necessarily that she didn’t like school. She did. Charlotte loved learning, but she liked to learn on her own terms. She could reread a book that was assigned reading freshman year and get ten times more out of it on her own than when she had to dissect it for every little detail that a teacher wanted her to find. Plus, she could spend less time worrying about making good grades in classes like science and focus more on the subjects she preferred, like English and history.

When the bus dropped her off on her street, she enjoyed the fresh air and the sunshine on the short walk from the bus stop to her house before she settled in for what she thought would be a long night of homework. She didn’t see her mom’s car in the driveway as she walked to the side door, knowing that she usually beat her mom home from work anyway. Her mom would be home in another hour or so, which gave Charlotte time to straighten up the house a bit for her mom before starting on her homework. Most of the kids at Charlotte’s school could afford for their moms to be stay-at-home moms or for their family to have a cleaning service help keep the house clean, but ever since it was just the two of them, Charlotte tried to take some of the burden of being both a homemaker and the bread-winner off of her mom by cleaning the house as much as she could when she was at work.

This was another reason why Charlotte always liked to make her bed each morning. It made her feel as though if her mother were to look into her daughter’s bedroom and see a neatly made bed, it would make her feel like her daughter has everything together. And giving her mom that small sense of peace gave Charlotte some relief too.

Charlotte started downstairs first, cleaning rooms in the order that she knew her mom would come in contact with them: kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom. In the kitchen she unloaded clean dishes from the dishwasher and reloaded it with dirty dishes that filled the sink. The dining room was the easiest because it was the least used room in the house, so she just wiped the table clean of dust. She folded the blankets, fluffed the pillows, and watered the plants in the living room. And then she made her mom’s bed, ending her day the way she had started it -- with smoothed sheets and perfectly placed pillows.

Charlotte grabbed her backpack and headed up the stairs to her own bedroom where she dropped her bag by her desk and sat on the side of her bed, leaning back and allowing herself to relax for a brief moment before opening a textbook. Just as she was closing her eyes, something caught her attention in the corner of her eye. She turned her head, and saw a new addition to her nicely made bed.

Her small plush rabbit.

The one that normally sits atop a shelf in her closet. The one that has been there for the past five years. The one that went up on the shelf the year her father died because it reminded her too much of the book he used to read her at bedtime.

Charlotte knew for certain she hadn’t placed it there when she made her bed this morning, and she felt confident that this wasn’t her mother’s doing either. Her mom was so busy with work right now, the memory of a stuffed bunny wouldn’t have made it to her list of things to do today. Plus, how would she have known that Charlotte thought of this rabbit on the bus ride to school this morning? Had she said something to her mom about it? A quick scroll through their text conversation revealed that to not be the case. Was she daydreaming again? Would she wake up with her face in a textbook any moment now and realize this was all a dream?

Charlotte squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, exaggerating a strong blink to force out any sleepiness that might be lingering on her eyelids.

But the rabbit was still there.

And she could have sworn she saw her rabbit grin under his little velvet nose.