𝐒𝐎𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐍 𝐆𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐂 | twd

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ 𝟎𝟎. 𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐅𝐀𝐂𝐄

As a child, I was afraid of the vast land that surrounded our farm. Sometimes the fog would linger on the tops of the tall grass and swirl in languid tufts. Before we 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 that 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 come 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 reread her The Secret Garden on my father's porch swing than to swim in the watering hole or play with other kids. Her red boots were often covered in dew from her mornings of picking flowers, a stark difference from my childhood of mud-covered boots, scraped knees, 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 when the one she had was so special, so her. The next morning I prayed for forgiveness and helped her gather daisies.

It was because of her gentleness that Michael and 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. Claiming that she was too young and that he wasn't sure if it would even be a long-term situation. According to him, 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. It wasn't enough for me to accept him if he didn't accept it himself.

My father never said it, but just by 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. After ten and half years in that little blue building that now, I was questioning every look, every kiss, every I love you.

All of that doesn't matter anymore. It stopped mattering the moment the world flipped and I lost my Bug. Micheal wanted to take her to the city, a trip to see the aquarium. At first, I was hesitant, but I knew that he wanted to spend as much time as possible with her before he left. I was helping Maggie make dinner and listening to the news station on the radio when I found out about Atlanta. The knife slipped off the tomato and cut my hand, but there was no pain.

Instead, there was only intense ringing in my ears as I grappled for the kitchen landline, trying to reach Micheal's cell. The dried blood on the buttons would be there until the morning, a cruel reminder of my failure to reach them. No phones worked in this new world. Daddy wanted me to stay at the main house with everyone else, but I refused and went home once my hand was wrapped. 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.

But as the weeks ticked by, the scenarios racked up in my mind; each one worse than the last. It was strange but I found it calming to sit on the porch, and instead of fretting over Bug, I would imagine the state of other parts of our world. What happened to the dogs in the pound and the sharks in the aquarium? Patients in the hospital, who looked after those who lay in a coma? Were the paintings still hanging in the museums, or had someone stolen them? Was there an Infected clutching the Mona Lisa somewhere in the streets of Paris?

These little scenarios kept my mind calm. It kept me calm until the day when an injured Carl Grimes lay in my childhood bedroom, and my questions started getting answered.