Little Bee

by Chris Cleave

On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

In the church I sat in the front pew, with Little Bee on my left and Batman on my right. The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work—I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate—but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one’s address book dressed in black and exported into pews in nonalphabetical order.

Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.

was the month of May and there was warm sunshine dripping through the holes between the clouds, like the sky was a broken blue bowl and a child was trying to keep honey in it. We

But if you are a refugee, when death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death—sadness, questions, and policemen—and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order.

I am telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.”

Whatever happened to us wanting that?” “What happened to wanting, Sarah, was getting a few of the things we wanted.”

What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.

This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.