Hide

by Kiersten White

Her entire life has been after. But there was a before, wasn’t there? Is she living in another before right now, or will she forever be stuck in an infinite after?

If all the world is hell and evil is all around them, what else can they do but try to help each other?

People pretend things aren’t wrong, even when they can feel the truth, because they’re too afraid of what it means to look right at the horror, right at the wrongness, to face the truth in all its terrible glory. Like little kids, playing hide-and-seek. If they can’t see the monster, it can’t get them. But it can. It always can. And while you aren’t looking, it’s eating everyone around you.

She pushes on, knowing this is far enough, but needing to see for herself the center of it all. What a generation long before her summoned and paid for, and what subsequent generations decided to make others pay for. Trickle-down economics. They got the economy, and the blood trickled down the decades.

To the youngest generations we’ve tasked with saving us all: You shouldn’t have to. I’m so sorry.

When my oldest child was in eighth grade, the yearbook did a feature on her special faux–stained glass classroom window art. The purpose? To prevent active shooters from being able to see inside. From age five, American children have to practice hiding from bullets, and to protect themselves we let them have art. In a game of Gun, Paper, Scissors, which wins? So: All I have is art, too, and I wrote Hide as a scream of rage, but I had help.

Finally, to everyone who still insists they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps: For fuck’s sake, look up the origin of the saying.