hardly the solution
Moritz kicks back on his bed, scuffed boots flopping over the edge, dirty against the faded linen sheets. Tomorrow will be Thursday, and then Friday and then the weekend. He will pack his carpet bag, a present for his ninth birthday…as if Moritz was going anywhere at the time, just a silly child who didn't do his mathematics and played in the mud with the other ignorant village kids. Nothing had changed and Moritz has been nowhere in fourteen years, only as far as the larger town two miles away. So he's running away toward freedom, towards the grit and hustle of the cities he has only imagined, and away from pages and pages of false knowledge. A muffled ache in his brain tells him he is wrong to run away, but he can see no easier alternative.
Ilse ran away. She left her home one year ago. They used to be friends, when he was five and she was seven. They played, crouching near the ground by the forest, her long, tangled hair swinging by her back, his grubby knees bare. But Ilse was strange, different from the other children, and she left her parents when she was fifteen and never returned. Not that her reputation changed anything for Moritz, and yet every so often she seemed to appear back in the village, skin glowing, hair tangled, with exciting and awful stories with which to tease the girls who dared speak to her.
Running away, it is barely a cure for sadness, but it will have to do, at least for now.