Sadie Wilson-Greene
As a child, I feared the vast land surrounding our farm.
Sometimes, the fog would linger on the tops of the tall grass and swirl in languid tufts. Before Micheal and I built our home out there, it was a clearing—a large gap between the woods. I used to tell my sisters not to linger out there too long. It wasn't natural, and long ago, something happened to render these stretches of land useless. But for Bug, it was different.
Micheal always told her these clearings were gifts from God. A place for the deer to bask in the summer sunlight and for little girls like her to chase down lighting bugs after the bonfire had burnt itself down to embers.
Bug was a gentle kid, preferring to listen to Micheal re-read her The Secret Garden on my father's porch swing than to swim in the watering hole. Her red boots were often covered in dew from her mornings picking flowers, a stark difference from my childhood of mud-covered boots and tangled hair. I remember praying for her once, the night after she came home in tears when Victor Snellings threw her bookbag in the creek. It felt wrong, though, praying for her to have more spirit. The following day, I prayed for forgiveness and helped her gather daisies.
Because of her gentleness, Michael, I decided to wait and tell her the truth- that he was leaving us at the end of the summer. I wanted to tell her everything, but he urged me not to. He claimed that she was too young and that he only made the mistake one time. It was an accident, an unnatural one at that. He said he would only need to spend a year with Pastor Stanley to fix his afflictions, and then we could be a family again. That conversation ended in another fight when I told him we would never be together again, and even if he had slept with a woman, I wouldn't forgive him.
That ended in another fight.
My father never said it out loud, but looking at him, I could see the "I told you so" lingering behind his eyes. I was eighteen when we married, fresh in love with my high school sweetheart. We weren't even married a year when Lucy came. We lived on my father's land, a small, one-level farmhouse Micheal and some of his buddies had built in the weeks after our honeymoon. Ten and a half years in the little blue building that now had me questioning every look, kiss, and I Love You he ever told me.
Everything changed when the world turned upside down, and I lost my Bug. Micheal had planned to take her to the city for a trip to the aquarium. According to the news, I hadn't wanted them to go; we were supposed to be quarantined. But the city hadn't closed the aquarium yet, and it only took one custody threat for me to fold. After all, what kind of mother kept their kid away from their father? His words, not mine.
I was in the kitchen, helping Maggie prepare dinner and listening to the news on the radio, when I heard about the bombs in Atlanta. She had invited me up to the main house to keep my mind off the Bug and Micheal situation. The knife slipped from my hand, cutting me, but I felt no pain. Instead, I heard intense ringing as I grappled for the kitchen landline, trying to reach Micheal's cell. The dried blood on each button would remain until the morning, a cruel reminder of the failure to reach them. Daddy wanted me to stay at the main house with everyone else, but I refused and went home. It was closer to the road, and if Micheal and Bug came home, I would be able to hear the truck if I was waiting there.
As the weeks passed, my mind was filled with increasingly dire scenarios. It was peculiar, but I found solace in sitting on the porch. Instead of dwelling on Bug's fate, I would ponder the state of other parts of our world. What became of the dogs in the pound and the sharks in the aquarium? Who cared for the patients in the hospital or nursing homes? Were the paintings still hanging in the museums, or had they been stolen? Was there an Infected holding the Mona Lisa somewhere in Paris?
These little scenarios kept my mind calm. It kept me quiet until the day when an injured Carl Grimes lay in my childhood bedroom, and all my questions started getting answered.