Wall

My heart pounded my throat like a hammer as I saw her struggling over the wall.  She hit the ground with a dull expulsion of air and lay there, very still.  I waited a minute, clutching my shirt around me tighter, hardly daring to breathe.  There had been a long line of us running away from the flames and I guess I was expecting some of the others to make it.  I kept staring at the darkness above me, the horizon between safety and what lie beyond.  A string of barbed wire winked at me above the harsh stones.  Screams echoed and died along the cobbled streets, a symphony of suffering on a xylophone of indifference.  

I turned my attention to the girl again.  She still lay crumpled just as she had landed.  No pool of blood surrounded her head, so I figured she would be ok.  I got up from where I was crouched and approached her.  A long gash ran up her leg from her knee to her thigh where raw skin peeked behind a curtain of ripped denim.  Her nails were caked with dirt and blood.  Ashes streaked her arms, a tattoo of the nightmare that was her reality. 

I moved the hair that veiled her face and her eyes blinked to life.  Around her neck, an amulet glowed the color of the fire inside both of us.  She rattled a stream of words I didn't understand, a language all her own that I could never hope to understand.  I just nodded.  Pain is universal.  My own tongue felt heavy in my mouth as I spoke words that were foreign to me.  New vocabulary.  I had never suffered like this.  She smiled sadly as I fumbled over the words.  She patted my hand and looked away from me, back over the wall.  Her gaze was as distant as the moon that glowed red from the smoke. 

The next moment we were walking.  Nowhere in particular, just away. 

Day by day, we put a day behind us along with the fire that nearly destroyed us.  Fresh, pink skin grows in places all over my body where new life insists on replacing the old.  But the smell of smoke still lingers in my dreams.  No matter how many times I wash my hair, I think the tragedy has invaded my follicles.  The rancid smell comes from inside of me, a scent of experience that haunts me.  There is a spot on my face that won't come clean, no matter how hard I scrub.  Maybe I will learn to accept it someday.  Things could be worse, I suppose.  I'm lucky that the scar that distinguishes me is in the shape of a butterfly.  A promise that I can transform into something greater than I was before I left my cocoon.