Free Paradox - Progeny Of Innocence (bk2) (Paradox series) by Patti Roberts Page B

floor the day of her father’s funeral.
    She ran her fingertips down the delicate soft spine, remembering. She absently began singing the melody from her jewelry box; somewhere, over the rainbow, blue birds fly... She quickly sat up and reached for the box sitting on her bedside table and turned the key at the bottom until she could turn it no more. Then she placed it back down, opened the lid and watched for a moment as the tiny ballet dancer with her arms stretched high above her head twirled around and around. Slowly, slowly the little ballet dancer began to wind down, and stopped, her arms stretched above her head, her eyes fixed, as though frozen in time. Grace’s eyes brimmed with tears that did not fall. She let out a heavy sigh, gently closed the lid, and returned to her journal. She turned another page and stopped.
    Movie butts were taped on the page from the day her father had taken her to the movies. They had gone to see ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’.
    Afterwards she had dressed up for hours and pretended to be Galadriel the golden haired Noldorin princess, daughter of Finarfin. Hope was her faithful sidekick as they fought side by side to slay their ferocious enemy. They had always been victorious in their various battles to save Middle-earth. Brian had made her a timber sword and she had used the lid of a plastic garbage bin as her shield. She had painted a giant eagle on the black plastic in gold paint, and told her father that the golden eagle would protect her.
    It is a shame that real life events very rarely portray the grandiose victories personified in fiction.
    Little did Grace know that her childhood battles were educating her in the artistry of war, preparing her for the formidable opponent that was lurking in the murky shadows … waiting.
    She turned the page to another photograph. The photograph had been taken at Brian’s last birthday party, around the small kitchen table. It was also the last photograph of the three of them together as a family, a picture of Brian, Kate, and Grace, and the bright light that hovered persistently over Grace’s shoulder.
    When Grace closed her eyes, she could still taste the chocolate frosting from the cake she and Kate had baked for Brian.
    Grace had helped her father blow out his birthday candles. Ready, Grace, on three, he had said, and she blew as hard as she could.
    Today, however, she wrote carefully on the coarse ivory pages. No rushed words or scribbled drawings. Today, she was writing a letter to her father, just as she did every year at this time. Today was a Wednesday. Wednesday the 22nd of April 2009. Her father had died five years ago on this day.
    She ran her hand over a photograph, willing her father to come to life under her fingers. Tears, too many to hold back, eased their path down her cheeks and onto the pages. She sniffed, and brushed them away with her fingertips, smudging some of the words on the page.
    Next to the photograph of her father was stuck a small, clear plastic bag. It held dried, faded rose petals from the rose she had plucked from Brian’s coffin, just moments before it had disappeared out of her reach into the dark muddy hole that had swallowed her father up whole that day. She remembered how she had hated to think about her father lying down there in that dark deep hole in the earth, cold and all alone, restrained for eternity in a satin-lined timber box. She still did. Goosebumps made their shivery way up her arms and she gulped down a choking sob. "Oh, Dad, why can’t you still be here? I miss you so much." She turned another page.
    There were curls of her father's brown hair that she had retrieved from his hairbrush after he had died. They had been lovingly stashed in there too, for safekeeping.
    She had told Angela once that she wanted to be prepared, just in case the documentaries she had seen on television about human cloning became a viable option in the future. You never know, she had said to