"My name is Pandora!" announced the little girl as she jumped into the room.  She spread out the gathers of her new dress and then twirled around in a circle with a laugh.

Neither of her parents' visitors seemed impressed.  They weren't smiling.  She looked over at her father, but he was reading a newspaper.  She could hear her mother clanging dishes in the kitchen.  Her parents had told her to be on her very best behavior tonight for their guests, so Pandora had worn her fancy new dress and put her hair up into pigtails by herself.  No one was complimenting her though. 

Pandora frowned in annoyance.  The visitors looked familiar to her, like those people at that horrible school her parents had taken her to visit last week.  She studied them more closely. 

The couple were sitting on a sofa waiting for Pandora's mother to announce dinner.  The man had large drops of sweat on his face and scalp.  The fat man had almost no hair, but what he had was gray.  His head was covered in fat freckles too.  Everything about him seemed fat to Pandora. 

The woman was fat too, but  where the man was like several balls stuck together, the woman was made up of rolls: neck rolls, belly rolls...even her kneehighs were slowly rolling down making her fat calves look like rols above and below the rolled stocking.   The woman kept shifting so that she and all of her rolls looked like a slinky moving back and forth.  Then she farted. 

Pandora made a disgusted face, but none of the adults were paying attention to Pandora. 

"I like goldfish," Pandora told them.  "And jellybeans and jumping and swing sets.  When I grow up I want to be an airplane pilot .  I'll do circles in the sky and shoot bad guys."  Pandora pointed her fingers like a gun and began shooting the guests, "Bam, bam, bam!"

The man rubbed his forehead as though he felt a headache coming on.   Her father rustled his paper but said nothing.

Pandora nodded once as though satisfied with her work, and then put her gun away. 

Turning back to the couple, she continued.  "I like to watch TV, and I can climb all the shelves in the cupboards.  The cookies are always way up high, but I get them.  I'm good at finding Christmas Presents too.  Sometime I find things that aren't nice."  She bit her lip as she looked down.  "I don't like it when that happens."

Pandora sighed and blew the hair off of her face, "I never go to school because the teacher is mean.  She yelled at me!"  The woman tutted, but said nothing else.

"I read books all the time.  In books when a teacher is mean, the kids throw her out the window.  I'm a good reader."  The woman tutted again.  So Pandora lifted a thick book off the shelf and opened it to a page that had been heavily colored with a pink marker.  "See, I can read this!  It's a dictionary.  Here's my favorite word, gadfly!"

Pointing to the pink markings, Pandora said, "I can draw good.  I use my markers to decorate my books, walls, toys, and anything else that looks too plain."  She set the book down and looked around.  She pulled one of her pigtails into her mouth and begin chewing on the hair.

"I can do cartwheels and summersaults.  I run really fast too.  I lost a tooth last Saturday."  Pandora opened her mouth wide to show the empty space.  "I hid the tooth under my pillow, but the tooth fairy is scared to come get it.  I think someone told her about the trap I set." 

Pandora frowned, but then quickly smiled again.  "Mommy says she hopes that I have kids just like me!

"I like to play games too.  I'm good at Hide and Seek."  Pandora nodded for emphasis.  Then she reached forward and slapped the woman's thigh as hard as she could.  The woman sat up straight and farted again. 

"Tag, you're it!"  Pandora yelled as she ran out the door.  She kept running down the walk, up the street, and beyond the neighborhood before anyone could say her name.  Then she kept running.