“Sarah?”

She turned and stared at me. She did not know who I was in that moment. I died some. I died quite a bit. I sat beside her, looked around for danger.

“This is a nice spot,” I said.

She said nothing. She was not having a seizure, but she said nothing. She played with the cuticles of her thumbs.

“Let’s go home.” I reached over and took her hand, and I saw a flash of recognition in her face. I looked at my mobile phone and saw that I had no signal. We walked together. We sang. Lydia, oh Lydia …

Here comes an old soldier from Botany Bay

a pocketknife

The way we treat each other changes at a pace that in all other arenas of human experience we would find intolerable. We might call the pace slow or unhurried or, most accurately, glacial. A glacier is a body of ice and firn that shows evidence of movement, occurring where the production of snow is greater than ablation and so continues from year to year, persisting even when a change in climate reverses the conditions that have allowed it to exist. So it is with the indecency, harm, and evil we inflict on each other, prejudice, neglect, torture, and slavery. Like glaciers, they are not unique to any one part of Earth. Like ice, it is both mineral and rock.

In case you forgot, my name is Zach Wells. It would not be so strange or awfully bad if you had forgotten. After all, my dear daughter will forget me, my face, my voice. It is inevitable. That means I cannot stop it from happening. It means that no one can stop it from happening. I suppose God could, but of course It has better things to do, bombs to drop, tornadoes to wind up, disease to unleash. There finally is also the fact that, well, there is no God. But there is a devil.

As my daughter moved ever closer to losing her voice, what young voice she had managed to attain in her brief and beautiful life, beautiful until life became what life becomes, my voice too changed, as inevitably, as necessarily. Logic is a harsh master. However, another quite undeveloped voice remained constant, stabile, even resolute. That voice had no timbre, no volume, no depth, no resonance, was a voice scratched out across small paper in blue ink, an unwavering plea for aid.