Black Bloom

They had been at camp four years, or more than four. She had stopped being able to say for certain. She had been eleven when they came and she was sixteen now, near enough, and Henry had been a baby of five or six and was ten. The seasons were the only calendar she trusted. You could count winters. Everything else ran together.

The memories of before were what brought the attacks on. She would be doing a plain thing, hauling water or splitting kindling, and some door in her would come open on its own and her mother's face or her father's laugh or the smell of their kitchen would come through it, and the panic would rise in her chest like water behind a broken valve. She had learned that she could not stop it from coming. She could only wait it out with her hand pressed flat to something solid until it went back down. It was like a dog on a chain that slept most of the day and then without any cause at all came off the chain snarling and put her on the ground. She could not kill the dog. She could only outlast it, every time, because Henry was watching, and she had promised Papa she would be the one who did not go to pieces.