It had obviously been several decades since the wallpaper had been stripped.  Owner after owner had just plastered their new wallpaper over the previous load, which, somewhere down the line, had left us with a very messy, boring job to do.

It wasn’t until we’d stripped the paper down to the last layer that we found the photos.

We didn’t know where they were from.  They were in a blank white envelope of the sort that we could have bough from Clinton’s Cards last week, and they showed…  Well, sometimes it was hard to tell.

The first photo showed a girl of about seven, running through the woods.  It was hard to tell which era it was- the photo was black and white, but the girl was wearing one of those lacy smocks that could have placed her just as easily in the Victorian era as, say, the Fifties.  Anyway, her back was to the camera, so we couldn’t see her expression, but she looked happy.

The second showed the same girl (I guess- she had the same clothes and hair) kneeling down in a clearing, her eyes shut, frowning in concentration.  She was sat in the middle of a circle.  It might have been dots drawn on the ground, but it might also have been stones or mushrooms.  It’s hard to tell with black and white.

The third photo showed the girl with a…

Well, we thought it was a dog, at first.  Say, an Alsatian crossed with something.  Then someone pointed out that dogs have eyes on the sides on their heads, not the front.  And their canine teeth don’t tend to extend that far out of their mouths.

The fourth photo just showed the dog.  It looked pleased with itself.

It was around that time that we decided to put the photos back in the envelope.

The End

She’s free now.  She wouldn’t have wanted to go on living like that.  It was no life.

She was herself again, at the end.  You could see it in her eyes.  All that anger, gone.  She was her old self.

She’s free now.  We’ll remember the good times.  How she was in the old days.

She didn’t want to live like that, hurting the people she loved.  I don’t think she knew how far it would all go.  She got more than she bargained for.  You always do, when…

Well.  I think, if she could have, she’d have thanked us.

Anger like that consumes you, if you let it.  There’s a lesson for us all in what happened.  Be content with what you have.  Forgive and forget.  Or you might find yourself doing things you can’t take back.

I don’t think that’s helpful, talking about some of the things she said.  She wasn’t herself.  We shouldn’t hold it against her.  Like I said, forgive and forget.  How else are we all going to heal?

Don’t dig things up and open old wounds.  She wouldn’t have wanted that.  You know she wouldn’t.

She’s free now.