Of die and dice

I was sitting on the granite stairs that lead to nowhere, they are form as opposed to function. I was writing by way of typing.

I looked around and across the stairway down there was a little girl playing on the mirror image of the stairs I sat on. Her father was close by.

She had a smoothie whose ingredients made it pink. She slipped and caught herself unharmed but she had lost grip of her cup and it tumbled two stairs down and I saw what I thought was an ice cube skate across the floor.

The father didn't say anything as the little girl escaped to her mother. He was a bit mad.

I looked to the left because the show was over, then someone's foot kicked something across the floor. I thought it was the piece of ice but what I had thought was ice was actually a die. It wasn't a normal die, it had a red large dot with the regular assortment of little black dots.

Smoothies do not come with ice cubes.

She was carrying it when she fell. I imagined that for at least the next six minutes she would be missing it.

If her family wasn't hanging out in the food court, I wouldn't be able to find her but I figured I would give it a try.

I picked up the die and entered the food court. The place was crowded. I couldn't see her on my quick glance around. I started to decide on how hard that I was going to look.

I started my more thorough search by looking at the counters where people stand to eat which was to my immediate left and wondered how I had missed them on my initial look around. I was practically in their space. It made me uncomfortable and I immediately felt that the situation would seem odd from their point of view.

Three minutes after the fact, some guy from a different section of the building shows up with their daughter's toy. Stalk much?

Whatever, I was there. I slide the die about an inch and a half across the counter in her direction. The father was keeping his back to me, the daughter was hiding in her mother's light gray sweat jacket. I choose the set of eyes that were paying any attention at all and asked, "Is this hers?"

The mother said yes.

I left.