I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She could go.
She could turn tail and run.
She could plunge herself into the freezing river because she thinks that maybe it would be easier to weather than his fury. It dams up her mouth, arrests the air in her lungs, knocks the earth off its axis. It roots her to the earth there in front of him. She couldn’t run even if she tried, she knows, had been foolish to even entertain the thought.
She knows it in the way she follows him away from the river’s edge, hoping that her knees will give out. She trembles. Not from the cold but from the dark thing surging through her. This foolish thing that keeps her steeped in his anger.
How remarkable that she should be so starved for attention that she will duck her head into this storm, let it crash over her in waves, let it hollow out her bones. Because no one has spoken to her in weeks and she has begun to rot and rust. Because negative attention is better than no attention at all.
Her breath is thin, burns her lungs, and she forces herself to meet his eye. The question is simple enough and so is the answer. She’d been thirsty and the river was the nearest source of water. A more complicated answer is that she hadn’t known anywhere else to look for it. It has been so long now since her father walked with her through this land, sharing with her its storied past. Even if she could remember all of the places he’d told her to look for help, it wouldn’t matter. Everything has changed and the people with it.
“I’m sorry,” she says instead, finally letting slip one of the apologies that has pulsed at the base of her throat for so many months now that she’s surprised it doesn’t come out rancid. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
lilian
