The Crisis by David Poyer Read Free Book Online Page A

lying on the ground. Farther away is a pile of things covered with black rags she’s afraid to look at.
    She no longer knows where she’s going. But still she trudges on, singing about the turtle and the ostrich. She wraps her bleeding feet with cloths she finds along the road. She sings all the songs she knows, until her lips bleed. She stares back at two girls who push a cart with bicycle tires.
    Her bowels clench in familiar pain and she has to leave the road again.
    Â 
    SHE’S trudging on numb feet when a truck snorts along the road. The refugees part without looking up. The trucks won’t stop. Even if they did, bad things happen with the soldiers, with the truckers.
    A very strange-looking person leans out of the cab. Her face is white as the clouds. Her eyes are blue as the birds on a bowl Zeynaab used to eat from. Her hair’s like the silk of the maize. Zeynaab stops dead, staring. She’s never seen a human being like this before. If it
is
a human being.
    To multiply her astonishment, the woman speaks words she understands. “Little girl, where’s your mother?”
    â€œShe’s dead.”
    â€œYour father?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œHave you no family?”
    She doesn’t cry, only stares.
    The woman doesn’t need to invite her into the truck. She just holds out something in a bright wrapper.
    Â 
    THERE are three other children in the back, all boys. For a moment her heart leaps; but none is Nabil or Ghedi. The mountains go in and out of sight, then grow ahead as the truck twists and turns upward. One mountain stays. She tugs on the woman’s arm when she needs to go into the brush. When the woman realizes she’s sick she gives her a bottle of strange drink. It’s salty but sugary too. Zeynaab drinks it all and when she’s done the woman gives her another from a box on the floorboards.Then she unwraps the filthy rags from Zeynaab’s feet and throws them out the window.
    The truck climbs, and the cab, where she rides with the woman and the driver, smells bad. When it overtakes refugees the woman tells the driver to slow. She leans forward, searching as they press through the throngs. Now and then she tells the driver to stop. When Zeynaab realizes what she’s doing a chill shakes her.
    She’s looking for children who are alone. Like the witches in the stories her aunties told her. Is she in a story now? Where are they going? She tries to muster courage to ask, but can’t. The truck lurches as it climbs. Enormous rocks loom over the laboring vehicle, throwing cool shadows. Birds she’s never seen before dart past. She needs to stop again, but puts it off so long it’s almost too late. The woman smells sweet. It comes to Zeynaab that she herself is the source of the bad smell.
    At last the truck heaves to a stop, panting like a tired elephant. She’s never seen an elephant, only a picture in a book Auntie showed her. Her auntie went to school, when there were schools, in the Italian times. The driver lets down the gate in the back. He calls the boys to come down. He gives each of them a bottle of water. He shows them how to twist the caps off and they drink, eyes searching the sky as they tilt the bottles up.
    The woman takes a pair of shoes from a box. They’re red as the guava flowers after the rains come. They’re plastic, and they
sparkle
. They’re so beautiful she can’t take her eyes off them as the woman bends and slips them over her torn, nailless, blackened toes. Then comes around to the side and, before she’s quite ready, holds up her arms for Zeynaab to jump down.
    Her attention’s still on the wonderful shoes, so she doesn’t notice, at first. The woman tugs at her hand, and she turns. And gasps.
    The mountain rears above them, a cliff that goes up to where the sun lives. It’s half in shadow, and rocks and stones jut from it. Only after walking for some time, new