The Little Girl

IT NEEDS (serious) EDITING BUT I CAN'T BE ARSED

The little girl was in the park with her mummy,
taking their dog out for a walk.
She was eating an ice cream in a cone;
not a Mr Whippy, but one of those
fancy ones from the stalls with Italian sounding names;
it looked like it was raspberry ripple.
The dog suddenly started sprinting
towards something he had seen in the distance.
The little girl giggled with glee, and followed
at top speed, ice cream clutched in her hands.

(Two months earlier, in the same park, a youth
named Lee was working,
putting in new paving slabs along the path.
It was 4:45pm on a Friday night and his boss
was yelling at him: "hurry up! Finish the ****ing
job so we can go home!"
Lee was displeased, not least because of
the bosses' spittle, splashed across his cheek.
So he rushed through the last few slabs
(the last three he barely even cemented.)
Then he sloped off
to smoke cannabis with his mates
and throw stones off the pedestrian bridge
that went over the A2 near his home.)

The dog showed no sign of slowing down.
He remained unaware of the fact that
the little girl had caught her little red sandal
on the edge of an unsecured paving slab,
and was sprawled across the path.
She was crying and her knee was grazed.
The raspberry ripple lay, cone pointing up,
the (now dirty) pink scoop splattered across the slab.