"But I don't like it, Mommy."
The little girl's bright orange hair was the most incongruous presence in Queensbridge Park that afternoon.
Or perhaps it was more than just the color of her hair.
"Elva." The girl's mother's attempts were hushed and edged with something inexplicable, a weariness, a suppressed kind of urgency.
Only eight-year-old Elva did not understand.
Her small lips were pressed sullenly and her brows were pinched as she looked and questioned and waited in askance with an unblemished simplicity that only a child could.
Waited for an answer that would never come.
Nia gripped her daughter's hand, softly tugging—around the importunate puddle lingering from the morning's storm. Around the elderly man on the bench.
Nia recognized the withered stranger's stare, locked on them as it was, his penetrating eyes moving from her loquaciousness daughter to her own. She saw the warning behind the disapproving scowl. Behind the aloofness. The desperate look of fear. Of knowing.
But Nia knew too. Better than anyone, Nia knew.
There was a darkness, in this stranger's eyes, a sweeping impotence that mirrored Nia's own. Her unspoken response was of quite acknowledgement, of thanks, because there was altruism in his attempt, in his warning, where his eyes dared to look too long where others did not.
She urged her daughter onwards.
But Elva was too stubborn, too willful. A child's impunity.
Her pink backpack bounced up and down, discordant against her unruly curls as she tugged back on her mother's hand. "They took Crysta's daddy, Mommy. Just like Mrs. Novak. They took him."
"Elva." She gripped her daughter's arms.
And the lies were poison on her tongue as she spoke. As she told her daughter her best friend's father had left to perform his duty, for his country, to keep them safe. Not that he had been labeled a deviant. Not that he had been guilty of nothing but rectitude and refusing to conform to the tenuous safety of the very lies she was speaking.
And each lie told since its ascendancy had compounded upon itself. Each lie more nebulous, less convincing as moral depravity grew. Each lie burned stronger with the bitter taste of resentment for all it had taken from them.
There was an emptiness now, as Nia looked at her daughter. Even as her words implored, implored to understand what could not be understood, there was an irreparable void of something lost.
Because it was already too late.
And how far had its roots grown that it could crawl beneath every such principle built and rob a child?
But it could.
It had.
And it would.
The little girl had fallen silent now, if only for a moment. Perhaps she had finally sensed something in her mother's tone.
Nia stood stooped before her daughter. A flock of pigeons soared over the Greenway as a cyclist road up the path. A man walking unhurriedly, his hands in his pockets, dared to give Nia a brief but cordial nod as he passed. A second cyclist moved past, disturbing the air, ruffling the pages of the newspaper sitting abandoned on a nearby park bench. And Nia wondered how it was that they could all so easily lapse to the pretense when she felt every breath it took like a cancer seeping through her veins, unobstructed and unrivaled.
Ignorance, avoidance, was a refuge long extinguished.
Especially for Nia.
The newspaper ruffled again, its pages moving insistently in the breeze, taunting in the face of its triumph.
Nia needn't look at it. She had already read every headline, just as she had every other day, the bustle of the newsroom as natural to her as breathing.
Nia knew what was written within its pages.
And she knew what was not.
The pages stilled. The headlines boasted thwarted attacks in the voice of the savior that had created them and spoke of upcoming elections in the illusion of democracy.
It was perhaps amongst the most frightening of indicators, that this medium, the medium of the people, the glue that held them together, the eyes and ears, the front lines that questioned, translated and exposed, had been so infected, its voice robbed of truth, its face transformed to a spurious reflection in the visage of Samaritan.
There had been those who had fought back, those who had resisted. But Samaritan had been inaugurated by the people themselves, born of a fear that could not be contained. It had fed off this fear, fostered it, exploited it like a skilled shyster until the people saw truth where there were lies, enemies where there were none, terror where there was subterfuge, so blind had they been that they had welcomed a monster of their own creation with open arms and marveled at its brilliance whilst it hunted in silence—while it fabricated truths and reason to acts that had none.
Until no more reason remained.
Insurgents had become terrorists. Insurgents had become deviants. Deviants had become outliers. Deviants had become men, women—any who would oppose it. Deviants had become those who would not conform. Deviants had become any it could exploit. Deviants had become men, women. And children.
What reason remained then?
But too late they had realized. Like the fear that had created it, once unleashed it could not be contained.
It bought silence with fear. Loyalty with dominance. It lied, it cheated, it plundered. It endowed whilst it destroyed. Cured whilst it infected. Enacted genocide to alleviate famine. It slaughtered tantamount to the very calamitous acts it existed to prevent and called it by a different name. It toyed and manipulated, nefarious and expedient in its means to assimilate human behavior. And all the while it spread like a noxious disease, suffocating from the inside out, stealth and brilliance immeasurable. And it took. It took until nothing remained.
~o~
Darkness had pressed down without prelude, where unforeseen clouds slid the sky closed like a gentle giant would close its eyes to weep. Perhaps there was comfort in its solitude. Perhaps not.
A car door slammed from further up Queensbridge Park Greenway. A jogger hurried to find shelter as the first drops hit the pavement. Only a few stragglers remained.
The newspaper lay abandoned on the park bench, the rain hitting its surface in a soft pattering of increasing rhythm, its pages stilling as they dampened. On the neighboring bench the old man still sat. Uncompromising though he appeared, one ought to look closer; perhaps he had seen; perhaps he had felt—because in his lap his hands shook.
Lying discarded on its side beneath the newspaper, the patter of rain louder where it hit its plastic surface, was a child's pink backpack.
Somewhere in the distance, the gentle giant wept.
