Red Dress

The Girl in the Red Dress is a scary story about a little girl who is locked in her room because her grandma tells her she was bad.

Granny locked me in my room and she won’t let me out. She says it’s because I was bad.

Sometimes I do bad things. Ever since my mommy went away. Granny says my mommy is in heaven. I don’t know how she got there.

I can still remember mommy. I remember her long black hair and her dark eyes. I remember her red lips and her white teeth. I remember her soft skin. I remember the way she smelled.

Her red dress still smells like her. It’s hanging in the wardrobe in her bedroom. Granny keeps mommy’s room locked. She says I’m not allowed in there, but I know where she hides the key. Sometimes when granny falls asleep I sneak in there and smell mommy’s red dress.

I have a friend called Mary Ann. She lives across the street. Sometimes she comes over to my house to play. She came over today. We were playing with dolls.

Granny told me, “Don’t go into your mother’s room.”

“OK,” I said.

When Granny took her nap, I told Mary Ann, “Let’s play dress-up.”

I took the key from Granny’s hiding place and unlocked the door to mommy’s bedroom. We went inside. It was almost too dark to see.

“This is where my mommy lives,” I said.

“You don’t have a mommy,” Mary Ann said.

That made me angry. I opened the wardrobe and took out the red silk dress.

“This is my mommy’s dress,” I said. I held it up to show her.

“It stinks,” Mary Ann said.

“No it doesn’t,” I said. “It smells like flowers.”

“It smells like dead things,” she said.

That made me even more angry.

“Who’s that?” asked Mary Ann. She was pointing at a picture.

“That’s my mommy,” I said. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“She’s ugly,” Mary Ann said. “She has creepy eyes and her teeth are weird.”

“No she hasn’t,” I said. “She looks like the most beautiful girl in the world!”

“She looks like a dead thing,” Mary Ann said.

That made me the angriest of all.

I don’t remember what happened then. I think I heard Mary Ann screaming. I don’t remember why. It was dark and I almost couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear anything except Mary Ann screaming.

I think something bad happened.

Then I remember granny shouting at me. She was crying too. She took the red dress off me. She was really rough and she kept hitting me. I was crying too.

Granny fetched a washcloth and wiped the blood off my face. She told me over and over how bad I was. Then, she dragged me all the way upstairs and locked me in my room.

I looked out the window and saw granny in the back yard. She was burying something with a shovel.

I must have done something really bad.