The Imperative

Flick the brains and dust off your boots and focus your senses on the forest again, the noises in the distance, like the birds singing again. If the birds are singing again, then you are safe to stay in shock for another minute or so. Still, it would be best to get some feeling back in your face and hands. Don’t look at the bodies. You are alive and still standing. Slap your cheeks. Shuffle your feet. Don’t pant. Slow your breath to four seconds of inhaling, holding onto it for four seconds, then let it out for four seconds. You don’t have to succeed one hundred percent every four seconds. Just try. Notice that the sky is still blue. Smell the pine and dirt and blood and cold. Feel how dirty and gritty your hands are from hiding on the ground. Listen to your hungry stomach growl. Hunger is good. It means you are alive. Don’t look down. Look east through the trees. Do you hear gunfire and engines to the east, or only the north and west? If the east sounds silent walk that way. Don’t look down. You are not bleeding. You cannot stop your sister’s bleeding. She is dead. You remember. Walk east through the trees. There is nothing you can do to disguise your genetic heritage. The wrong people will recognize you by sight anyway but stop a second still and swipe up some of that goopy mud. Smear it on your yellow star. Camouflage it. They can’t yell at you for ripping it off that way, but the flash of yellow won’t give you away in the bushes. Walk on. Keep going east. There is a river bed that way, you vaguely remember from that walk with Papa last year, before Jews were shot in the head on the street or put in trains to never return. You know there was a cave. There will not be food, but you will have all the water you can drink and you need to drink. You are still alive. Do not look at your boots. You can wash them in the river later. Look at the ground directly in front of you. Glance up, to the right, to the left. Make sure no one is near. Look for signs of the river and the cave. You were so scared of that cave last year and it’s great dank maw above the burbling water slapping rocks. Anything could be hidden in its thick carpet of decaying twigs and leaves. You could be hidden. You know the cave is an imperative security blanket now. 

Stop!

You’ve stepped on a twig. There is shuffling nearby. Loud. Bigger than a squirrel. Is it to your left? Can you outrun it? Probably not. Climb that tree, the pine with too many limbs. You are small enough to be hidden in it even if you can’t get more than halfway to the top. Yes, the limbs are sticky with sap and wet. Keep going. Quietly. The shuffling is close now. Definitely human. Make your breathing silent, lower than a mouse’s, just as Papa showed you before he put your hand in your sister’s and told you to go hide under the woodpile. In and out, breathe under your hand with your fingers spread so that the puff of air looks no different from the steam of the tree’s great bushy needles tickling all around you. Watch below. There you see, shuffling into sight, a woman with a muddy yellow star. Make a decision, can you afford to ask her for help or offer her your help to find the cave? What is survival worth? It is a difficult question. You are only ten years old, but there is no more time to grow up first. How do you survive? In company or alone? You decide.