Game

I thought we were playing a game in a forest that day. I ran as my mother chased me. But she’d been stung by a bee. Or bitten by a snake. She shouted my name, which even as a child I knew was not “Stop. Please. I’m dying.” I ran deeper into the bright black trees happily as she chased me: How lovely the little bits and pieces. The fingernails, the teeth. Even the bombed cathedrals being built inside of me. How sweet the eye socket. The spine. The curious, distant possibility that God had given courage to human beings that we might suffer a little longer. And by the time I was willing to admit that all along all along I’d known it was no game I was a grown woman, turning back, too late.