Marissa lived alone, and her dad couldn’t bear the thought of it.
Whenever he visited, he did the same thing. He’d pull a little plastic soldier from some pocket and hide it in a corner of the house. He said a woman living alone needed “a decent security system”. And over the years, she found them one by one, standing guard beside the cereal, behind the TV, keeping watch over the toilet paper.
Her father died three years ago. Marissa thought she’d already found his entire little army.
A few days ago, she took apart the kitchen light fixture to change a bulb and found one more inside it. It was lying face down, its rifle aimed straight at the front door. A sniper positioned at the best vantage point in the house.
She shared it with humor, because that’s the kind of dad he was: “Turns out I had a sniper covering me this whole time. You old trickster, I miss you so much”.
