Nightingale

Chapter Two: Never Enough

I hate seeing her cold, shivering into the night as we sit here idle in this shipping container. It broke my heart to finally get the solar panels set up outside just to realize that the clouds lately were too thick to charge the batteries for more than an hour of heat. Over the past few days, it had never been enough for both of us to not shiver as we slept.

I watch her in our bed, my little sister shivers under blankets while I tinker with the space heater hoping for god's miracle to turn it on if only for a minute for a few degrees. Her cheeks are rosy underneath light brown hair, she looks at me and melts my heart into tears asking without a word if I had fixed it. I shake my head no and begin to tear up further, my eyes growing hot and myself wishing I could convey this heat to her. She closes her blue eyes and buries them into the pillows that I change every week after searching in houses and old stores for hours to find ones not water logged, ruined or burned so she can sleep on clean bedding. 

I climb under the blankets behind her, taking her into my arms and she lifts her head as she always does for me to put my arm under it and wrap my arm around her, be her gaurd into the night and help her heat her small, seven year old frame. My other arm wraps her torso and she curls into a tighter ball and moves closer to me.

I feel as if I hold the whole universe within my arms, everything I do is to keep this little girl safe and happy even if I'm not always successful. 

In a sense she is more my own daughter than my sister. Genetics in the end mean little. I was already eighteen when she was born, twenty one when both of our parents had been taken by the events that lead to the end of the world and isolated us from everything we knew.

They left one night, leaving me with an old hunting shotgun and saying they would be back with more guns and supplies. I had already seen one or two of the things, my father tearing one apart with the same shotgun and burning the grey skinned, red eyed beast in the backyard the next day. Three weeks into it and all hell was breaking loose on the East Coast of the United States, we were preparing to make our exodus from New York, they were gearing up for it.

They never came back. My sister didn't understand why, I just watched her cry as I tried to sleep during the days and protected her during the night with a pot of coffee and a gun poised towards the basement door up the stairs. She would sleep soundly through it all. The moment I tucked her in on the fourth dusk and kissed her forehead goodnight, I realized I was now her sole caretaker, her adopted mother.

I remember trying to explain to her three year old mind that mommy and daddy weren't ever going to appear again. She wailed so loud that it shattered my soul and I imagined god covering his own ears to muffle the earth breaking noise. I held her for hours, soaked my pink sweater in dark spots of a child's tears and snot. 

"Kierra?" she asked in a soft voice, my eyes opening and gazing out toward the metal wall three feet from my face.

"Yea?"

"Could you sing for me?"-- of course I could. I began a tune in my alto voice, drawing from an old poem I remembered, but had no recollection of from where that stuck had in my heart through the years.

The hills rolled over each on each,

'till all their changing shadows died.

And in the open skyward reach,

the light drifts solomn side by side.

and of these hills the western most,

lies high his majesty of coast.

in shifting waves of dim blue brine,

against a distant orange sky,

in the pathos of the after glow.

I sung it slowly, lingering on every ryhme with an elongated note. The melody was simple and minor, haunting and celtic in the way it moved. Like an Irish lullaby from thousands of years past. She was sound asleep and breathing deeply by the time I had finished and I closed my own eyes and held her like a teddy bear. If it wasn't for her, I'd have no more reason to live. In the morning we would wake, leave this container we slept in every night and go to the house we spent our days in. Hopefully the clouds will clear up soon, then tomorrow we can both sleep comfortably rather than just her, siphoning all the heat my own shivers make.

My eyes are heavy, like weights hung upon my black eye lashes. Thank you god, for all you have done and for watching over us in a world meant to test us all. Let me sleep now and wake to be this girl's gaurdian angel....