"Lollipop, lollipop, ooh, lolly, lolly, lolly, lollipop! POP." The child's voice brought a smile to Xanth's face as the young girl, no more than six or seven, stuck her finger in her mouth and popped her cheek in time to the song. She was a vision of childhood, with her denim dungarees scuffed and muddied at the bottom and her pigtails fraying. Her red hair gleamed under the artificial sunlight and her eyes sparkled as she sang the same three lines of the song over and over. Indeed, she was the picturesque embodiment of childhood that Xanth herself emulated so frequently.
The girl had been chasing about the quadrangle where her mother had left her for an hour now. The frazzled young woman ordinarily would not have dreamed of leaving her cherished daughter alone in a place such as this. While the Underground made its claim to fame on the back of its purported safety, that security had been lost in recent months with one attack after another. It had been quiet recently but the mother was perhaps a little overprotective and it was easy to see why when watching the child at play.
Still, it had taken only a nudge from Xanth to convince the mother that the quadrangle was a safe place to leave her daughter while she finished her shopping. The young woman had forgotten several key items and was in a hurry; she did not have time to go back to those shops with her exuberant daughter in tow.
Xanth leaned forward on the bench to catch a falling petal in the palm of her hand. She need not watch the child's every move to know exactly where she was and what she was doing at any given moment, so she turned her attention to other things such as the study of the pink petal. It had come from one of the cherry blossoms that cornered the quadrangle and it occurred to Xanth that perhaps it was time for autumn in the Underground. But not today: Today this young girl enjoyed the summer sun.
The girl had been chasing about the quadrangle where her mother had left her for an hour now. The frazzled young woman ordinarily would not have dreamed of leaving her cherished daughter alone in a place such as this. While the Underground made its claim to fame on the back of its purported safety, that security had been lost in recent months with one attack after another. It had been quiet recently but the mother was perhaps a little overprotective and it was easy to see why when watching the child at play.
Still, it had taken only a nudge from Xanth to convince the mother that the quadrangle was a safe place to leave her daughter while she finished her shopping. The young woman had forgotten several key items and was in a hurry; she did not have time to go back to those shops with her exuberant daughter in tow.
Xanth leaned forward on the bench to catch a falling petal in the palm of her hand. She need not watch the child's every move to know exactly where she was and what she was doing at any given moment, so she turned her attention to other things such as the study of the pink petal. It had come from one of the cherry blossoms that cornered the quadrangle and it occurred to Xanth that perhaps it was time for autumn in the Underground. But not today: Today this young girl enjoyed the summer sun.