9 - I live in a drawer

 

I’m a sixteen year old girl who lives in a drawer.

Not all the time, but during those times when THEY come looking for us.

My mother and brother live in drawers, too.

But not my father.

He’s too big and needs to stand in the back of the closet, hoping no one will look in there when THEY come.

I still don’t understand it all, about what might happen if THEY find us.

My father says it’s too horrible to explain.

But I hear the cries at night, girls’ voices like my own, and boys’ voices, and the voices of the old – all of whom did not stay in their drawers or attics or closets like they were told and now get dragged down the street to some place I can’t even imagine.

I hear them mostly at night when the world gets quiet, or when my father rushes in to tell us to hide, and I climb into my drawer, and my brother climbs into his, and my mother – always last – holds my father for a moment as if she might never see him again.

We always hear the boots, snapping on the cobble stones, and the rattle of metal on metal, my vision seeing the stiff soldiers in their leather and helmets and rifles on their shoulders as if going to war.

My father says there is a war someplace, in Poland or England or France.

We don’t really know.

But sometimes we hear the planes, and the guns and the bombs, and wonder if they will ever reach us, and if we will still be safe in our drawers when they do.

 


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