Out of the Dark by Claire C. Riley

Author:Claire C. Riley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2016-05-25T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen.

#17. Fill those hungry holes.

We walk for several miles in total silence, nothing but the breeze in the trees to occupy the hush, until abruptly Lilly stubbornly refuses to walk anymore. She stares at the ground at her feet, unwilling to look up at me. I give her arm a small tug, but she still doesn’t move. I get down on my knees and try to look into her face, but still she stares at her shoes, her eyes unwilling to meet mine. I remove the flapping cow cap from her head and she finally looks up at me, her expression defiant as she snatches the cap back and puts it firmly back on her head with a small pout.

“What’s wrong?” I ask her softly.

She waits a beat before replying. “I’m hungry, Mama,” she whispers back. And then she begins to cry.

“I know you are,” I whisper, as I pick her up and she wraps her arms around my neck.

I carry her, singing to her softly as I walk, the sound of my voice floating in the slight breeze. I make the song up as I go—the tune, the words, are all spur-of-the-moment fiction from my own mind. I can’t remember music and how it once sounded. Not the sound of guitars or drums, or any of the lyrics from songs. It is all gone, blanked out from my memory as if it were too painful for me to remember. Yet I somehow string some words together that have some semblance of a tune, and I sing a song that she likes. My voice carries an unknown tune that eventually calms her, and she stops crying.

In time we come to a children’s park, and I point to it and whisper to her to look. After much persuasion, she lifts her head from my shoulder to see what I am talking about. She doesn’t smile, but she’s interested, and that’s good enough for me.

I push open the little green gate and we go inside. There are two swings, which are both broken, and the merry-go-round squeaks loudly when I push it around, so I tell her she can’t go on that as it could draw attention to us. But the slide still seems good and strong—safe—so I tell her that she can go and play on it. I begin to gather stones and twigs to build a fire, and she climbs the steps, her footsteps sounding loud yet hollow on the metal stairs. She slides down without even smiling, and I wonder if she likes it at all, but then she goes back around to the stairs and climbs them again before going back down the slide once more. She’s here, and yet not. Her body is on a continuous loop, going up and down that slide, yet her mind is unaware, blissfully or perhaps ignorantly somewhere else. I don’t blame her; I want to be somewhere else too.

The park is only small, enclosed by what was once a green metal fence, and I search all around for twigs and stones.

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