A big man walks toward me and the boy. His head is shiny, and there’s one of those wood-cutting things hanging from his hand. I think it’s called an axe.
Why is there red stuff dripping from it?
“No! Please! I beg you, they’re only kids!”
I don’t like the way Mommy’s voice sounds. It makes my eyes sting.
The man looks at the boy. “Get out of the way, kid. Mercy is not preserved for those who stand against the stones.”
The boy runs forward with the sharp thing held above his head. His scream stands out the most ... until Mommy makes a louder sound at the same time the axe is swung.
He stops.
I push to my feet, try to follow ...
Watch him fall.
Watch the light leave his eyes.
I take one, two, three whole steps, then slip on the sparkly stuff spilling from the hurt in his chest. But he doesn’t catch me. The tickles never come.
Mommy keeps screaming, louder and louder.
I crawl through the wet, curl up beside him, and wait for him to blink ...
Smile ...
Laugh ...
For him to stop looking at the wall and tell me everything’s going to be okay.
Big, strange hands pull me away from his warmth, and my nightgown is ripped, the top of my arm poked over and over.
I kick, wriggle,scream—louder than Mommy and the squealing sounds in my ears.
Put me down ...
Put me down!
But the words don’t sound the same as they do in my head because I never needed to speak.Hedid it for me; somehow knew what I wanted to say.
And now he’s broken on the floor in a puddle of wet.
I feel something inside me growing from the place where my heart is, and ithurts ...
It hurts so much I think I’m going to crack open and everyone will see my insides.
I think I’m broken, too.
The memory shifts—an ocean pulling back into itself before another wave strikes.
The roof caves, someone screams, and all I can smell is pain;burntpain that makes me want to spew.
I’m watching from the outside, no longer in my child-body.
Nothing is.
It’s all escaping through the splits in my skin and my eyes and my ears and my wide-open mouth—an oily blackness spilling out in vicious, torrential spears.
