I failed my word count challenge again—this is 284 words. 
I may cut it up later.

She drowned when she was only three. I wasn’t watching. She went down so fast and the spot where she was standing smoothed so quickly, I was left staring at a giant lake with infinite places where she could have been. She never broke the surface. It was like something just pulled her under.

Mama blamed me. She was right to. One minute Anna was stamping her red sandaled feet in an inch of water, the next she had disappeared. I was so young at the time, and my imagination filled in the gaps strangely—in my mind I saw her walking into the lake, each step a bite to sate the water’s appetite. Chomp, there go her shoulders. Chomp, her neck. Chomp, she’s gone.

That was the summer that lasted forever. The sun was a blinding, accusatory eye glaring down from the heavens. The lake was empty that season. Anna had poisoned the water and no one wanted to go near it. The lake was dredged, but nothing came up. She was just gone. Everyone thought I’d lied.

I never told anybody what happened on the first day of winter after she died. How the lake froze over with the thinnest layer of ice and how that layer sprouted crystal blossoms of perfectly formed ice flowers—they looked like the King Protea I had seen once at the Botanical Gardens, bulbous at the base with rays of petals bursting from the center. A sea of tiny suns.

They disappeared shortly after, melted down by the morning light. But I saw something before they were gone—a tiny red sandal cradled in an ice flower out in the middle of the lake. A little gold buckle glinted in the dawn.