Excerpt: The Glass Jar

A girl sitting in the sunlight.

"I'm having trouble sleeping." She tugged on her hair, staring blankly out of the window at the clear summer day.

"Are you still having nightmares?" The woman sitting opposite clicked her pen, once, twice and shifted her weight in the wing-backed chair.

"Yeah. I-" The girl lowered her gaze from the window, her hair was a curtain of loose black curls hiding the profile of her face. "I hear them, all the time. I don't even know if I'm awake anymore. I feel like I'm walking around in a dream - and that I'm actually still back there, I'll wake up and still be there."

The woman uncrossed her legs, smoothing the wrinkles from her striped blouse. "Have you been taking the medication that was prescribed?"

The girl caught her lower lip between her teeth, took a deep breath and rolled her shoulders. "Not really." She traced the shadow of the window rails, falling across her jeans in the shape of a cross.

"Sadie, the meds were prescribed to help you sleep, to help you deal with things."

"I don't know. They just made me feel numb, less aware of things. I don't want to feel empty, I just want to feel better."

The woman leaned back in her chair, scribbling onto the notepad resting on the flat of her armrest. "We all want you to feel better, Sadie. It was terrible what you went through." She studied the girl across from her, the way her collar bones jutted sharply against her dusky-brown skin, the way her clothes hung limply on her body. "Do you still have problems eating?"

Sadie looked up, bringing her knees up to her chest. Her voice was soft, distant. "I haven't really been hungry. Nothing tastes good anymore, it all tastes like gunpowder." She leaned her cheek against her knees. "I'm sorry, Miriam. I've been trying, I just- I don't feel right, being alive. Why did I survive and everyone else, all my friends, die?"

"It wasn't your fault, Sadie." Miriam replied, firmly, reaching across to take her hands.

"But then why did he pick me? What was he trying to tell me? I feel like- if I just understood in time, no one else had to die." Her voice shook as she said this, even though she had asked those questions hundreds of times. There were no answers, no closure.

"It wasn't your fault."

"There's something I'm not seeing, Miriam, it feels like- like I'm looking at one of those Magic Eye things and I keep missing the picture. And if I'd just seen it-" Sadie rubbed her eyes on the back of her hand and then a tissue from the Kleenex box that Miriam handed her. "I don't know. I don't think I'm getting better, it feels like I'm getting worse."

"No, Sadie, you're doing fine. You're a lot stronger than you know, you can come here and you can talk about it and I can see you're trying to get through this. It just takes time and you have plenty of time." She watched Sadie unfold herself from the chair and stare back out the window, looking out over the courtyard of the building and then to the city skyline.

Sadie was quiet for a long time, worrying a hangnail between her teeth. Finally she said, her voice more steady, "I don't know."

"About what? Getting better?"

"About having time."