The girl’s despondent eyes brimmed with tears upon hearing the news. She ran a jagged line down her arm with her index fingernail, staining her frayed mustard dress with tiny droplets of blood. Dark streams of a murky combination of eyeliner, tears and snot penetrated the contours of a face that had once been beautiful. Her breath remained short and lifeless as she struggled to piece jumbled phrases together as an explanation to the waiting crowd. As the words left her cracked lips, she immediately realized she had committed a fatal mistake. There was no explanation, this wasn’t her story to tell. As the anxiety continued to pent up within her, her speech began to make less sense than it already did. Then, she finally hit her internal boiling point. Her entire body began to burn with a vengeance it had never experienced before and she simply could not take it anymore. She had cracked.

Her bare feet left muddy footprints on the sandy ground as they softly tip-tapped. As she ran, her numb body gently swayed in rhythm with the breeze. The blazing sun sparkled in all its glory, silently bronzing her already tan skin. She imagined the crowd, still waiting for the answers they had never gotten. The answers they would never get.