Humming.

A little girl sat on the steps inside of her two story house. The brown carpet was like a comfortable seat, her ice cream covered in dark chocolate crunched. The sound of humming and a dragging vacuum was just above her.

The girl would spend her time on the basement stairs some days, listening to the low humming of the woman upstairs as she worked tirelessly. The basement was the only place of solitude, this was soon to be gone because her younger sister had prepared to take one of the rooms of the basement for her own.

The girl licked her lips that tasted sweet and prepared to stand up for another one. The soft steps swallowed her feet in lush carpet but soon her feet met cold concrete. Her soft feet made a soft padding sound.

She soon reached a deep freezer, white with a red rust on the edges. She opened the freezer and was shocked to find the ice cream gone, her hands shook the frozen items out of the way as she frantically searched.

The craving for a chocolate ice cream made her frustrated.

As her hand reached deeper and deeper into the cold depths, her arm hairs began to rise. The little bumps rose to her neck making her shudder and step away from the freezer. It was a new sensation she had never felt before. It scared her.

Her sweetly coated tongue reminded her, however, that she was doing something important. Well, to her anyway.

Her hands went back into the freezer, the rustling of plastic and the cardboard boxes being swept to the left resounded in the quiet room of the basement.

No ice cream.

She shut the freezer door in disappointment. Her stomach rumbled with displeasure and so she went up the basement stairs to the first floor. The humming had long stopped during her expenditure for the taste of chocolate. 

A woman with voluptuous body proportions had stepped out of a doorway and greeted her. She greeted back, tired, and sat at the dining table.

“Mother, we’ve run out of ice cream.”

Her mother coldly glanced in her directions and went upstairs. She didn’t know what she had done to suddenly sour her mother’s mood.

She looked down at her sticky hands and saw they were painted red. When had she touched something red? She couldn’t remember no matter how hard she tried.

She must have accidentally spilled something in the deep freezer. 

She stood up to wash her hands at the sink but no water came out. She fiddled with the dials, seeing no water coming out she bent down to check the pipes. Nothing wrong.

‘Hmm.’ She went through the house looking for a working sink but none of them pumped out water. The last bathroom was in her parents room but she didn’t want to go in there. It was unlikely it was working anyway.

She went back downstairs, the red liquid had dried on her hands, leaving a dark brown color. She smiled. “Oh! Chocolate.” As her tongue swept her hands her face grimaced but she carried on. Her hands were clean after a few minutes and she carried on with herself, “that tasted pretty good.”

It didn’t taste like chocolate but it had a nice aftertaste. Her craving had been satisfied.

Dinner rolled around and her mother settled a platter of freshly made steak on the table. 

Mother would usually prepare dinner until father was home but today seemed to be different than usual. There was always ice cream but there wasn’t any today, there was always water too, it was a day of many unusual things.

“Mother, aren't we supposed to eat with father?”

Her mother smiled at her, eyes crying out a black substance and said “We are.”