Lost
At night she walked the streets like a lost spirit.
Or maybe just a lost child.
She was only a child. That at least was true.
But she had seen far too much to be at all childlike.
In the darkness she sighed quietly. Unlike her to make a fuss about anything.
She wandered among the wounded and the dead and wondered if, perhaps, she was meant to be among them?
To die at the barricade. Such a romantic passing. Perhaps he would come as she drifted off, and whisper his goodbyes to her.
Perhaps she could die happy.
If life had used her this way, surely it could afford her the sort of death that would mean something to her.
For all her life she had lingered in between the world of the good and the world of the lawless.
She was something. And yet nothing. A person but not any kind of person.
She could fade with the bitter wind and no one would notice.
She could slip silently between worlds and into oblivion.
Without knowing it she had wandered into the fight – wandered into the realm of the dead and the dying.
She saw him. He seemed to hover before her as if a ghost, only a hundred yards from her, and as if in a dream – no, not a dream, a nightmare – she saw a man hoist his musket to his shoulder and aim it at him.
In a frenzied terror she ran until she had found the man and the gun and she cupped her hand around the muzzle of the weapon.
A moment later the blood was rushing out of her body through her hand and her chest and her back, and she had slipped out of reach of anyone and to the dirt ground, and she wondered if he knew she was there.
Perhaps she would be granted this last, bittersweet, wish.