The most direct route between the school and her home was a weed-choked path in the field between the town and the river, but the girl didn’t know it existed so she stuck to the streets that went through the center of town, even though that meant walking past the checkpoints and crumbled facades that had long ago stopped breaking hearts and were now just the way things were.
Her route took her past the park to the crossing that still bustled with shops and cafes in spite of everything. Sometimes she would stop to buy a sweet before continuing home. If she walked past her building, which she never did, the avenue would eventually take her to the walled compound where official visitors stayed when they were allowed to visit.
One morning on her way to school she noticed a group of foreigners walking from that compound to the town by way of the field, and she asked her mother about it. Her mother confirmed that a path existed, even several paths, but even before the war they weren’t very popular. Dog walkers and early morning joggers had used them for relief and exercise, and in the evenings teenagers would go to gaze at the river and do the things that teenagers do when they aren’t being watched.
Before the war really got going, when such things were still shocking, a sniper hit one of those joggers in the head. His blood left a stain on the path that was only washed away by rain and sun and time. Teenagers kept coming but in ever-smaller numbers until they stopped. Then the town stopped tending the grasses and they grew to be taller than a person.
Now that the government controlled both sides of the river, there was no more sniping to fear, and since the river was too deep and swift to cross, nobody had ever bothered to plant mines, so it was probably safe to use the path now, but her mother cautioned that it wasn’t significantly faster than the streets and it was probably unpleasant anyway, with insects and stray dogs and possibly even bodies.
The girl saw the foreigners trek through the field every morning for four days, wearing vests that identified the organizations they represented. For whatever reason, they didn’t take the armored cars that drove too fast down the main roads. Maybe they wanted to take in fresh air before going to the municipal building where they would spend the whole day in meetings or negotiations or whatever it was they did in there.
She never saw them come back in the evenings, but maybe they went home late, after the girl was already inside.
Like all official visitors, the foreigners only stayed a few days. On the fifth day, the girl noted their absence. That afternoon, when school let out, she sought out and found the trailhead behind an informal garbage dump. There were no warning signs, not even old ones trampled on the ground, and no standing or dismantled fences or wires. A dozen or more adults could see her as she took a few steps into the path, and none of them waved for her to get away from there, so she went in, and discovered that after the initial wall of garbage-fed weeds, the path was actually quite clear. The tallest grasses grew along the road and the river; here in the middle, the vegetation was low enough that even she could see over it.
The path had decayed to dirt and rock but was still usable, and from it she could see the shattered buildings of the town center and the long rows of apartments in her own neighborhood.
Pretty little flowers grew in and around the path, and she did her best to avoid stepping on them.
She was charmed by a small brown creature that fled from her into the overgrowth: it definitely wasn’t a rat, and might have been a rabbit. She whispered for it not to be afraid of her, and continued walking softly. City sounds burst in from time to time, but if she minimized the sound of her own footsteps and breathing, she could make out the tiny symphonies in the grass. She passed grasshoppers and beetles, and though she couldn’t see them, she could hear that there were birds hidden nearby.
The main path intersected a few others, and one of these deposited her onto the avenue right in front of her building. The whole trip took fifteen minutes, which was definitely faster and more pleasant than going through town. She decided that this would be her new route from now on, even if it meant forgoing sweets. It would save her money, anyway, and grant her fifteen minutes of quiet. Fifteen minutes without hearing boys yelling in the schoolyard, or cars and trucks and armored vehicles squealing and belching and rumbling through the town, or the loud everyday dramas of people who went to the shops every day even though they had no money to buy anything and not much was for sale anyway.
It meant not passing the soldiers who eyed everyone nervously and randomly inspected bags and pockets and sometimes led people away to the other walled compound, the one in the center of town, behind the municipal building.
She looked at the colors of the flowers that grew wild, and she watched birds flit back and forth following urges only they could understand. She saw a cat with a mouse in its mouth, and nearly stepped on a green snake that looked too much like a fallen stalk. Sometimes an insect would call out into the void, and sometimes for no obvious reason a whole choir of insects would answer back.
Once she was home there would be no more quiet. She lived with her mother and three other families in a building facing the avenue. They all constantly fought over petty things, or argued about politics, or accused each other of crimes big and small. Everybody was stressed, and they took it out on each other because they couldn’t take it out on whatever was responsible for their misery.
She and her mother had moved in the previous spring, when the campaign ended. Their old house, near the bridge, had taken a direct hit that killed her baby brother and probably also her dog. At least the dog had never been found. The baby was. It was the third child that her mother had mourned that year and she was getting numbed to it. The girl admitted to herself that as sad as it was, without the baby things would be a lot easier. Her mother could work in the day and the girl could do homework at night.
On the path, the girl’s mind went into a passive trance. She didn’t use this quiet time to reflect or meditate. She was eleven years old, soon to be twelve, and although she was old enough to know and understand what was happening around her, she wasn’t old enough to process and analyze and seek meaning in it. What should she have thought of otherwise? She could remember her father, who disappeared early in the war without explanation. Or her oldest brother who left home to join the rebels and died in a raid across the river. Or her sister who was taken by soldiers just before the spring offensive. She came back later that night, and the girl both knew and didn’t know what happens when a group of men take a young woman away, and both did and didn’t understand why she opened her veins in the bathroom of an abandoned apartment.
Or she could think about her school, which despite the odds stayed open and took in the town’s children day after day, even though the teachers weren’t paid and the books grew shabbier every year, and stray bullets and shells sometimes fell in the playground or slammed against the walls or sometimes the children.
Should she think about the morning at the schoolyard when a fifteen-year-old girl suddenly shouted the famous rebel slogan and detonated the bombs in her backpack, killing the principal, two teachers, and herself? This happened when the spring campaign was nearing its end and government officials were moving into the municipal building even though the town hadn’t been entirely taken yet. The principal had agreed to cooperate with them to keep the school open.
The children went back to class because there was no place safer for them to go.
Thinking of nothing was better than thinking of this. In only a matter of days, the walk through the field became a cherished ritual. She didn’t even tell her friends, so they wouldn’t be tempted to join her.
One unusually warm day, as she walked along the path, she saw through her empty trance a large black shape in the grass and stopped to examine it. It was a rifle, one of the long shiny ones that government forces carried, as opposed to the stubby and dirty ones that the rebels favored. She picked it up and in doing so disturbed the soldier to whom the weapon belonged. He was lying in the tall grass. His lunch was next to him, and she understood that he had stopped to eat, and it being such a nice and warm day, he had fallen asleep. By the time he woke, the gun was in the girl’s hands.
What a sight it must have been for him. She was thin and her hair was limp and lifeless but her face betrayed a quick if untutored intelligence. The rifle was comically oversized in her hands.
What a sight he was to her. He had the softened features of a boy who had grown up far from the front. It was fitting that his uniform was half off and that his weapon had rolled away.
She turned the rifle in her hands so the barrel pointed at his head and her finger could slide over the trigger. The butt stuck out behind her between her arm and body. She needed both hands to hold it steady.
There was a moment when he could have snapped to attention and pulled the weapon from her hands. He was trained to move quickly. He could have snatched it and she would have probably been so taken off-guard that she wouldn’t have resisted. At most, she might have squeezed off a round that would have passed harmlessly into the grass.
But that moment passed.
He propped himself up on one elbow without rising from the ground. He looked at her and smiled, as a big brother might do to a little sister.
“Okay, you got me,” he joked.
Her big brother wasn’t like this. He was loving but hard and unforgiving, even to her, and as he had grown older he had only grown harder. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him smile. She had never seen him this old.
She felt the rifle slipping and she shifted her grip. In doing so, she flipped the safety. The two motions alarmed the soldier. “Hold on, little girl,” he said, moving back as far as he dared without scaring her. Her finger was on the trigger, not to threaten him but because she didn’t know not to do that.
What should she have been thinking about? Revenge for her family? Anger at a war that neither of them caused? She thought of those. About the soldiers who hurt her sister. About the baby who died in his crib. About the butterflies that drank from the flowers, and the grasshoppers that leaped so nimbly from stem to stem. About the weight of the weapon in her hands and the everyday indignity of checkpoints and the disappeared, and the foreign observers who came and asked questions and sometimes gave away things that were both worthless and essential at the same time.
About the young man in front of her whose eyes were wide with fear. She held the gun higher. She had never been bigger than somebody before.
“Give it here,” he said quietly. “I won’t hurt you. You go your way and I’ll go mine. I won’t tell anyone.”
She both did and didn’t know what would happen if she pulled the trigger. He would die, and she would be a murderer. She both did and didn’t know that she would have nightmares and that his face would haunt her to her final days. She both did and didn’t know that there would be repercussions for the whole community, that he wouldn’t report back to base and they would come searching for him, and find him, and that this sector that had been declared secure would become the focus of renewed anti-rebel activities and that there would be more checkpoints and more disappearances.
She both did and didn’t know that she wanted him dead, and both did and didn’t know that he wasn’t himself at all but something larger and entirely incomprehensible.
“Please,” he said, in a plea that she would someday think of as pathetic, in both senses of the word.
The report was swallowed whole by the quiet. The kick knocked her back and pushed his face down into the dirt. When she regained her footing, a thin and undramatic stream of blood issued from the hole above his ear. His eyes stayed open but they weren’t looking at anything, except perhaps the ladybug on the grass directly in front of him. His mouth opened and closed once but didn’t make a sound.
She couldn’t move or drop the weapon, or take her eyes from him until he gasped and coughed and died. She realized that she hadn’t breathed since she fired, and she already couldn’t remember pulling the trigger.
She took a breath now, inhaled the fresh air of the field, the freshest air in the whole town, and glanced around. She was alone still, or again.
The girl dropped the weapon beside the body and continued on her path. When she turned onto the path that took her home, she became aware of how fast her heart was beating, and how her arms and legs were shaking and how her whole body was slick with sweat under her school uniform. She didn’t see the colors or hear the sounds anymore.
When she reached the avenue, she saw the pockmarked buildings and the sheets that hung over holes in the walls. She drew a deep breath and it burned her lungs, and the colors rushed back and the sounds re-emerged. Her legs stiffened and her heart slowed. She wiped her hands against her uniform, looked both ways, crossed the street, and went home.