I inch forward. I follow the girl. She’s crashing through the forests, screaming. She doesn’t want to die. She wants to become whatever it is she’ll become, if only she lives. She wants to see her parents again. She wants to lie in the narrow bed in her childhood room, following the slight tear in the wallpaper with her eyes in the soft darkness, just one more time. I follow her desperate sprint in between impenetrable patches of shrubbery, across clearings, across streams, alongside a dirt track, into a tiny hamlet with a single meandering mud track alongside which sit squat gray brick houses with tin roofs and black gashes for windows. She screams. People come, rubbing sleep from eyes, muttering in a foreign language.

She lives. She goes home. I open my eyes.

The cabin is there, just yards away, its middle window still lit up invitingly by the oil lamp I forgot. I drag myself over to it, then through the door, collapsing on the floor, shaking and retching. The gray slate tiles feel warm and smooth beneath my fingertips. Fresh blood rushes from my nose onto the tiles, dripping onto the dried blood stains already there. I close my eyes. I thank the girl that was me in my head for showing me how to live.

48

Kristina

I drag myself into the bathroom and crawl onto a turquoise Berber rug between the bathtub and the compost toilet. Its lid is shut and I manage to pull myself up onto it. I’m shaking uncontrollably and my fingers are a strange shade of gray-blue. I blow on them repeatedly and after a while I feel some warmth return to them. I manage to slowly peel off my jeans, though the pain as I graze my left ankle is so intense it momentarily takes my breath away.