Very meticulously, the men, all dressed in black, of the Black Hand made their way through the village, killing every living thing they came across, burning every building, crop, and structure of the village down to the ground. And they laughed as they went through their grisly task.
“I want you to stay in here, Era, all right?” a young woman whispered to her girl child. The little girl stared up with big wide brown eyes into her mother’s worried face.
“But, Mother –“
“Erasma,” the young woman, barely more than a girl herself, said to her child. “These men out there are bad. They would kill you and me if they found us. I want you to stay here, safe. We can’t be seen together, because if they find one of us, they find both of us.” There were tears in the young mother’s eyes now.
Reach up, Erasma gently touched her mother’s face. “Mother, everything is going to be all right,” she whispered. “Right?” For a girl of four, Era was rather intelligent about things that went on around her. And her mother never hid things from the girl – it gave Era’s life and childhood a more mature outlook than those of her own age. Not only that, but it had given Era the intelligence that she had gained from this kind of childhood.
“I do not know, baby, but I hope so,” the young woman said. And those were her last words to her daughter. She set her little girl down inside a hamper, closed the lid, tears streaming down her face, and laid it down in the grass gently.
She straightened and darted to the back of the building, into the shadows, and then she was gone.
Little Era sat inside that hamper for a while, trying not to cry, still believing inside her young heart that everything was going to be all right as soon as the bad men left. But then a scream of absolute torturing pain ripped through the afternoon air and then tears began to earnestly spill down her cheeks as she recognized the voice that had uttered the scream.
My eyes opened.
It was so simple, but yet the hardest thing to do everyday – opening your eyes to find that the day you had fallen asleep too had been washed away by the coolness of the night and that a new day had replaced the one that you had known before. But on some days, I wished my eyes would never open.
Rolling to my feet, I stretched, twisting side to side, savoring the loose feel of waking up in the morning, reveling at how my body always seemed to do as I asked. I rolled up my bedroll with a kick when I finished stretching and strode over to the dying embers of the fire to start up my breakfast.
While toast and some cheese melted onto it was warming up, I washed in the stream, as I always did, every morning. I luxuriated in the cool water as it streamed over my toned body, cooling me down.
