Captive

She licks her lips, dry like the autumn leaves that fall spinning from the trees. She is standing there, just standing, as if she is waiting. Her eyes dart to the hilltops, scanning, flickering, watching. She thinks they are coming.

She is right.

They come running, pouring down the slopes on all sides. They are shouting, accusing, clutching at her clothes, her skin, her hair. They rake their nails down her arms as they shout in her ears.

“What have you done with your life?” they are asking, screaming. “What have you done? Who have you helped? Who have you saved?” They dance around her, cackling, and they answer their own questions. “No one!” they sing. “No one!”

“Stop!” she begs them. “Stop! Please! Don't you know I can't save everybody?”

“You have saved no one!” They scream, high and loud, their voices cracking in a hundred places. “You only watch them die. Watch them as they melt away their insides, as they carve into the marrow of their bones. Watch them as they tie their veins in knots. As they exhale dead breath like smoke. As they fade in and out like a failing siren! You watch! And you cry! Hah! What good are tears?”

She is crying now, tears running hot and wet like blood from her eyes, and she pleads with them to listen.

“They don't hear me, the dying ones! They smile and their teeth are like glass, their breath like flame, burning them from the inside out, but they chose not to look. It's easier that way. Nothing I can do can make them look, make them see! Nothing!”

Her attackers refuse to concede. “Do more,” they insist. “More! Don't let her bleed, don't let him fall, don't let her get lost, don't leave him all alone. GO!

“This is who you are,” they say, the sneers shining on their faces, their long fingers caressing her skin with something like love, but more like ownership. “Go and save them,” they say. “Go and fix them!”

“I can't!” she protests, but even as she clenches her fists in defeat, she is moving, being carried across the dead and crumbled leaves. “Nothing I do will save them!” she cries as she is borne away by other wills, other powers besides her own. She shouts to them once more as she is whisked away over the hills. “I can't!”

And they, in their brutal assembly beneath the hills, whisper their answer.

“We know.”