… a nurse had shown me a cancer kid’s crayon drawing. “See that little blue car down there at the bottom of the hospital the child drew? That’s your car.”
Flames rejoice around the kindling, their elegantly dangerous silhouettes leaping from stick to log and back to stick again, bright against the dark of the night.
I hesitated to say it. I was only eleven, but everyone else, likewise entrenched in orange and black and equally pissed about the penalty, was chanting.
Sitting up, I reach down into my slick, green flight bag and pick up my English to Arabic dictionary. Thumbing through the well-worn pages, I search for the words I will need today. Hospital. Doctor. Medicine.
We dug into the ground, uprooting the shrubs and tossing them aside. We dug out stones and roots, de-housed spiders the size of plump ravioli and worms like fleshy shoelaces. Three feet into the ground we found an arrowhead…