Awesome Writing Prompt: What I Found Under My Parents' Bed

Hey there awesome possum Steemit peeps! This is Echo Cadence Bringing you, yet again, another amazing round of awesomeness with a little bit of a story~

If you have been with me from the beginning, you may remember that I mentioned awhile back in this here post that Echo Cadence is a codename and personification of mine~ While that is true, Echo is also a character I have created quite some time ago and is a super fun character write as!

I know you're questioning where I'm going at with this, and hold on to your horsies because I'm getting there~

As much as I love Gaeli and her Immortal Confessions, I feel that she deserves a better writing of her story; therefore, I've concluded that I must drastically improve my writing style and will be exercising my imagination out on your lovely folks!

So, without further ado, here is a writing prompt featuring yours truly: ECHO CADENCE!!!

Bright green eyes watched the slender and delicate hands of their mother smooth out the creases in the bedspread. A sudden spurt of pain blossoming in her abdomen made those brilliant eyes close shut for a moment, pale pink lips sucking in an intake of breath.

"Oh sweetie, that bad huh?" Inquired the slight lilt voice of her mother, her soft hand moving to her daughter's hand to give it a sympathetic squeeze.

"Why did I have to be born a girl," groaned the bed ridden teen, squirming as her uterus punished her for not yet carrying a baby. "This is soooo stupid! I get told to not have sex or else I'll be in trouble, and my fing body punishes me for it! If I do have sex, you and dad will find out and then I'll be in super duper trouble. I can't win!"

Her mother laughed at her words, her smile lighting up her normally stern and serious expression. "No, my dear Echo, I suppose that you can't win that game; not while you live under our roof."

"Hmmmm," Echo groaned, letting go of her mother's hand and pulling her stuffed pink rabbit plush into her arms, hugging it for comfort. "I can't believe that we're out of Tylenol, Ibuprophen, and the generic stuff!"

"Yes, I do find it odd that your father managed to deplete our supply within a month," the older woman mused, bright hazel eyes glancing up to the ceiling in thought. "He did sprain his ankle the other day while trying to show up your uncle in skate-boarding."

Echo giggled at the memory of her father trying to relive his youth by trying to out shine his younger brother on a skateboard and falling dramatically after three minutes of fun. "So he used up all of the meds on his swollen ankle and now we're paying the price of his selfishness."

"Well, it's more like you," her mother playfully poked the tip of Echo's nose, "are the one that's suffering." With that, her mother stood up and stretched her arms above her head, her sweater raising up slightly to show the faint scar of her cesarean, proof of Echo's birth. "I'll be back soon with more drugs for you to dope yourself on."

Echo laughed at that and then cringed as pain shot up her spine and down her legs. "AH! It's hurts to laugh. Please hurry; I'm having withdrawals."

Tugging down her sweater and walking to her daughter's door, her mother inquired, "Is there anything else from the store that you think you may need?"

"Chocolate-"

"Besides edibles."

"Romance novels, magazines featuring firm, male buttocks-"

"Anything that isn't porn related, my dear?"

"Heating pad?"

"That I can actually help you with," her mother said with a coy smile, "There's one in my room; your father has been using it to nurse his wounds and pride from the skateboard incident."

Echo had a feeling that her mother was implying that she get it herself, but the teen girl was in far too much pain to get out of bed, cross the hallway, and inspect her mother's domain to find the cure to her cramps. So, she turned her green-eyed gaze to her mother and willed them to grow bigger, her lips forming a sweet little pout, brown hair bangs falling perfectly on her forehead. "Please, please, pwwwweeeeaaaaseeeee bring it here for me?"

"No," her mother said flatly, her usual stern expression returning to it's station, but her eyes still alight with playfulness. "You must overcome this pain and find it yourself."

"AHHH," Echo threw herself back on the bed, throwing her arm across her eyes in mock agony. "Such cruelty!"

"Yes, yes, I am the definition of cruel after all." There was a slight pause after that, a heavy weight weighing in the air following her words. Echo moved her arm off of her face to give her mother a questioning glance, but the woman was already gone from the doorway, her footsteps walking away with keys jingling. "I'll be back in about twenty minutes. Try to not burn the house down while I'm off."

"I'll resist the temptation," the brunette called out, sighing as she heard the front door close shut. This was not how Echo wanted to spend her first spring break in high school. Granted, most of her friends were off on vacations or doing something bougie with their families, so it wasn't like she was missing out on hanging out with them; but still! Echo could be shadowing her father at the restaurant he runs or going with her mother to the lab, or invading her favorite bookstore and reading there for hours, or walking to the lake that was only two miles away. All of those things were out of question as her uterus was throwing was a bitch fit inside of herself.

Groaning softly, Echo turned to her side and pulled her bunny plush closer, trying to pull some comfort from her fluffy, stuffed friend. She's had the bunny for as long as she could remember, her parents saying that Echo was all but born with it. While it always provided her with comfort, there was some sort of scent on the stuffed animal that also gave the green eyed girl a sense of homesickness, which has always puzzled her. No matter how many washes the bunny has gone through, Echo could always swear that it was there.

Turning her gaze down to the faded and patched pink bunny, she admired the cute button eyes that has been resewn on countless times and smiled, the happiness reaching her eyes. "You are the most cutest thing in the entire world," she whispered to it, not caring that her speaking to an inanimate object was childish. "If you were a real bunny, you'd be the fattest bunny in the entire galaxy! Dad and I would feed you sugar cubes, cookies, carrots, carrot cake, chocolate.... ugn," Echo groaned again as another hot surge of pain flooded her pelvis.

"That's it!" She bit out at her bunny, kicking off the covers and climbing out of bed. "I'm burning the house down!"

Opening her bedroom door, she quickly walked to her parents' bedroom, her bare feet making soft padding noises as she walked across the tile floor. Opening the bedroom door, she was met by the beautiful view of soft cream walls, a massive king size bed with a white ruffle comforter spread neatly across it. A pale blue throw rug laid underneath the bed and Echo couldn't help but smile at the slight stain of red on the rug near her father's side of the bed, a memory of him trying to treat his wife with wine in bed and spilling it all over the place. Echo was amazed that they even had a white bed spread due to her father's clumsiness. In retrospect of this, she decided that it would be best if she didn't climb onto of the bed... due to her spurting blood from between her legs and all.

Walking to her father's side of the bed, she gently moved the covers off and sighed when she saw that the heating pad wasn't there. "Where did you leave it?"

Moving the covers back, she moved to the end of the bed and reached underneath, pouting once more when she found nothing. She moved her search to the dresser of miscellaneous things and wasn't really surprised when she didn't find it there either.

Closing the drawer shut, Echo pressed a finger to her lips and put herself in her father's shoes. "Okay, so I'm a 42 year old man with the maturity of a twelve year old with a sprained ankle. I wake up and realized that I slept through my alarm and rush out of bed..." Her bright green eyes sparkled with realization and she grinned. Dropping to her knees and elbows, she crawled closer to the bed. "I wouldn't be thinking about putting the heating pad back where it belongs, so it would have fell underneath the bed!"

Peering into the darkness, Echo was amused to find the heating bad tangled in a heap on top of a tubberware towards the back of the bed. Slightly pushing herself underneath the bed, she managed to pulled the plastic bin closer to herself, backing out from the bed slowly as to not bump her head, and when she emerged in the freedom of the spacious bedroom she did a swift victorious fist pump. "Ta Da!"

Echo carefully untangled to the heating pad's electrical wire free from the tubberware and paused when she saw a picture of herself as a toddler peering at her from the clear plastic. She blinked and began to feel the curiosity that killed the cat building up inside of her. Yes, Echo's seen pictures of herself as a baby from her mother's photo album, but there was a lapse from when Echo was a newborn to when she was three year's old, to which her parents explained that there was a fire in the house they lived in and destroyed most of the pictures of Echo as a baby.

Did her parents forget that these pictures where here, she wondered as she popped the corners of the lid off of the container, carefully pulling it off. Perhaps these were the pictures they saved from the fire, but they were too damaged to put into a book?

Once the lid was removed, Echo temporarily thrilled by the thought of finding some new treasures, new memories to share with her parents, but then was hit by a wave of confusion; yes, these were pictures of her at three year's old wearing a pink summer dress holding her pink bunny, but they were all the same photo on a handful of flyers with the words MISSING CHILD, LAST SEEN APRIL 1ST in bright and bold red. She stared at the flyers, her green eyes scanning the words of the flyer.

When did she ever go missing? Her parents never told her that she went missing on her birthday... and she couldn't recall a time when they were ever in Dawson Creek, Canada... She didn't even know where that was!

"Strange," she murmured, her hands gathering up the flyers into a neat stack and paused when she saw clippings from newspapers and print-outs from online with headlines stating, "3 Year Old Child Kidnapped From Local Gas Station," "$10,000 Reward For Information About Missing Girl," "Mother Begs for Child to Be Returned," and the most heart-wrenching one read, "The Sommer Family Gathers For Annual Lantern Lighting In Remembrance of Lily Sommers."

Echo has always been a swift reader, her green eyes swiftly moving from left to right as she quickly took in the words of the articles, the brilliant orbs widening steadily as the impact of these articles crashed over her mind. Echo's last name wasn't Sommers... it was Cadence... but her middle name was Lillian...

No where in the articles did it state that they ever found the girl, the last article being six years ago with the family lighting the lanterns... the news clippings fell from Echo's hands into a unorganized pile into the bin, her eyes wide and staring, her hands shaking.

"No," she whispered to herself, her eyes still wide and staring at the words, "Taken," "Family," "Begging," and "Lily." "That is impossible..." Tears began to prick at her eyes and she quickly shook her head, shaking hands wiping away the droplets before they can fall. "No, they never said who took the girl... that can't be me... that can't be me..."

Echo's mind felt frozen and electrified both at the same time, frozen in the horror and confusion of this startling find and yet moving a thousand miles an hour, trying to find a logical or reasonable excuse. "My parents are really well known, maybe this was just a hoax to get at them." If that's so, then why are they not mentioned anywhere as suspects "Why would mom and dad do that? No way! They would never do that to someone!" Mom can't have any more babies, remember how sad she was when she explained this to you? Maybe she really wanted a child... "No, no, no, That's all wrong! Dad wouldn't ever..." Dad always said that he would do anything for your mother, even joked about robbing a bank for her if she asked him to. Would it be all that surprising that he would kidnap a child for her if she asked? "Stop it... please..." Think about the supposed fire that destroyed all of the pictures of you since you were born. Suddenly, they have pictures of you at three years old... "They have pictures of me as a baby! I've seen mommy's scar, I was a C-Section baby... we've always joked that I was a tumor baby because I was removed, not born..." Your birthday is April 1st. The Missing Child posters say that you went missing April 1st.

Despite Echo covering her eyes to hide the damning evidence away from her gaze, tears leaked through her fingers and fell onto the flyers and articles, soaking through the words as the truth itself began to soak into her soul. It still didn't make any sense; why would her bright, loving parents willing and knowingly steal a child away from a family. Why would they do this? Why? Why not adopt?

The sudden sound of the front door opening stilled the tears that was cascading down her cheeks and an unfamiliar surge of uneasiness and anxiety surged through her as her mother called out, "I've returned with the good stuff. Come here and let me dope you up."

Echo's hands fell from her face, her eyes wide and staring at the plastic bin and the contents within it, unable to move or to look away although a voice within her was shouting at her to move.

"Echo?" Came the voice of her mother from down the hall, most likely from Echo's bedroom. "Where did you go?"

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING THIS!!! Any feedback, criticism, questions, or rude gestures is always welcomed! Tell me what you think and tell me what you liked, didn't like, and if you would like to know what happens next~

Until our next adventure~

Image Source: http://www.simplify101.com/organizing-tips/organizing-paperwork/storing-kids-school-papers/
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http://moziru.com/explore/Drawn%20smile%20anime/
https://shock777.deviantart.com/art/How-to-Draw-Chibi-Eyes-VIDEO-TUTORIAL-629381853
https://myanimelist.net/profile/FeelSide
https://en.fotolia.com/tag/%22under%20bed%22
https://aminoapps.com/page/virtual-space/2910390/dear-diary