The Great Alone

“Are you going to make me ask again?” Dad said.

The quiet of his voice was worse than yelling. Leni felt a ridge of fear poke up, spread along her spine. She reached out, took the tiny blue-red organ in her hand. (Was it still beating or was she trembling?)

With her father’s narrowed gaze steady on her, she put the heart in her mouth and forced her lips to close. Instantly, she wanted to gag. The heart was slippery and slimy; when she bit down it ruptured in her mouth, tasting metallic. She felt blood trickle out of the side of her mouth.

She swallowed, gagged, wiped the blood from her lips, felt its warmth smear across her cheek.

Her father looked up, just enough to make eye contact. He looked ruined, tired, but present; in his eyes, she saw more love and sadness than should be able to exist in one human being. Something was tearing him up inside, even now. It was the other man, the bad man, who lived inside of him and tried to break out in the darkness.

“I’m trying to make you self-sufficient.”

It sounded like an apology, but for what? For being crazy sometimes or teaching her to hunt? Or for making her eat the hare’s beating heart? Or for the nightmares that ruined all their sleep?

Or maybe he was apologizing for something he hadn’t done yet but was afraid he would.

* * *

DECEMBER.

Dad was edgy, tense; he drank too much and muttered under his breath. The nightmares became more frequent. Three a week, every week.

He was always moving, demanding, pushing. He ate, slept, breathed, and drank survival. He had become a soldier again, or that’s what Mama said, and Leni found herself tongue-tied around him, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing.

With as hard as she worked after school and on the weekends, Leni should have slept like the dead, but she didn’t. Night after night she lay awake, worrying. Her fear and anxiety about the world had been sharpened to a knifepoint.

Tonight, as exhausted as she was, she lay awake, listening for his screams. When she did finally fall asleep, she landed in a dreamscape on fire, a place full of danger—a world at war, animals being slaughtered, girls being kidnapped, men screaming and pointing guns. She screamed for Matthew, but no one could hear one girl’s voice in a falling-apart world. And besides, what good would he be? She couldn’t tell Matthew this. Not this. Some fears you carried alone.

“Leni!”

She heard her name being called from far away. Where was she? It was the middle of the night. Was she still dreaming?

Someone grabbed her, yanked her out of bed. It was real this time. A hand clamped over her mouth.

She recognized his smell. “Dad?” she said through his hand.

“Come on,” he said. “Now.”

She stumbled over to the ladder, climbed down behind him in an utter darkness.

None of the lamps were lit downstairs, but she could hear her mother breathing heavily.

Dad led Leni to the newly fixed and steady card table; guided her to a seat.

“Ernt, really—” Mama said.

“Shut up, Cora,” Dad said.

Something banged onto the table in front of Leni with a clatter and a clang. “What is it?” he said, standing right next to her.

She reached out, her fingers trailing across the rough surface of the card table.

A rifle. In pieces.

“You need better training, Leni. When TSHTF, we’ll have to do things differently. What if it’s winter? Everything might be dark. You’ll be off guard, confused, sleepy. Excuses will get you killed. I want you to be able to do everything in the dark, when you’re scared.”

“Ernt,” Mama said from the darkness, her voice uneven. “She’s just a girl. Let her go back to bed.”

“When men are starving and we have food, will they care that she’s just a girl?”