16 - Walking

“I’ll carry that.” I tell her.

“I got it.” she tells me, so I let her. A child’s backpack, she drags it along behind her, somehow younger. She is small. I never knew my own age nor could I see it in another, never wanted to guess either. I keep wondering who dressed her and sent her out to school like this but there is no school, there hasn’t been for years. I ache so much my chest feels as though it is being torn in half, slowly by a god that does not exist. I touch the place on my body where they have said my heart is, it helps.

“I can’t” she finally says so I help her get the other strap off her shoulder and at first I carry it in my hand, carefully like a duffel bag then move it to my shoulder with my own drab ruck.

“Get down.. You should come down from there.” I tell her.  She looks at me, happy as though I have just told her we have ice cream, or it’s her birthday but she can’t know anything about either.

“You could fall and hurt yourself like on that piece of glass yesterday, and bad people might see you.” I tell her, but I have scared her. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have just saved one of the rounds I have left, only fired six, the seventh would have been for her, If I knew I could do it, if I knew there would be no chance she would live even for just a minute …if they came.

She asks me where they are, the bad people, and I know I have made a mistake. I tell her that I don’t know, that they could be anywhere, that we need to be careful.

I may have been seeing things wrong. She tells me she is not a child. She isn’t. I have been stopping her from doing things, things that might have been fun, I don’t know, but that’s not it. She tells me she cannot be herself around me and when she tells me, it is like a long unused window has opened in my mind, or or in my chest and maybe both. It is like she has given me a vision but it’s not that either, I remember now, I have heard this before, a long, long time ago.

“What?” she says. I know she is not asking me anything so I don’t answer, I just look away, and for some reason I feel ashamed.

She will not eat the cakes this morning so I save them then eat them later when we are walking. She keeps asking me for juice, is that it? I tell her we don’t have any. I think of how to make it, how I could. It would be easier to make ice cream I think.

I tell her to look for trees, fruit trees but I don’t think she understands. I tell her for the juice, that we can make juice out of the fruit and maybe some water. She gives me the look I have been getting a lot from her, like I am stupid, like I don’t understand, like explaining is beneath her. Like I am wrong.