Cherry

by Nico Walker

THERE ARE countless women in the world. At times it’s more than I can bear to think about: that there should be so many and they all start out the way they do, with all the brightness and their own invisible worlds and secret languages and what else they have, and that we ruin everything. And I have been mangled by vicious killers in my time, but I haven’t ever doubted it was only that someone had killed them first. Someone like me.

But she wasn’t the hill I was meant to die on.

People kept dying: in ones and twos, no heroes, no battles. Nothing. We were just the help, glorified scarecrows; just there to look busy, up the road and down the road, expensive as fuck, dumber than shit.

When you have been afraid for a long time, you see how fear will come and go. How fear will overtake you. How fear will subside. How fear guts you for a moment. How hope puts you back together, till the fear comes back. Then the hope. Then the fear. I was only ever afraid of one thing in my life, and that was heroin.