Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,34

got home from their evening shifts.

“Are you sure it doesn’t remind you...” his mother started once, after gently suggesting he look for a real job, but she let the thought trail off unfinished.

“I wasn’t babysitting over there, Ma.”

“I know,” she said, but she didn’t, or she wouldn’t have thought to put Esther and those other kids in the same sentence.

The truth was Esther was the opposite of a reminder. In his old life, his job had been to knock on strangers’ doors in the middle of the night, hold them at gunpoint, and convince them to trust him. That was the easiest part of it. They went at night because during daytime the snipers had a clear shot at them and anyone who opened the door, but even in the dark, a bullet or an IED could take you out like that. Sometimes when they got to a house there were already bodies. Other times there was nothing: a thin film of dust over whatever was left, things too heavy for the family to carry and too worthless for anyone to steal.

The sisters were sitting in the dark, huddled on the floor with their parents, when Georgie’s unit pushed through the door. Pretty girls, big black eyes and sleepy baby-doll faces. The little one cried when they first came through the door, and the older one, maybe nine, clamped her hand tightly over the younger girl’s mouth, like they’d been ordered not to make any noise. The father was softspoken—angry but reasonable. Usually, Georgie stood back and kept an eye out for trouble, let the lieutenant do the talking, but this time he went over to the girls himself, reached out his hand and shook their tiny ones, moist with heat and fear. He handed them each a piece of the candy they were supposed to give to children in cooperative families, and stepped back awkwardly. The older one smiled back at him, her missing two front teeth somehow reminding him of home.

They were not, in the grand scheme of things, anyone special. There were kids dying all over the place. Still, when they went back the next day, to see if the father would answer some more questions about his neighbors, and the girls were lying there, throats slit, bullets to the head, blood everywhere but parents nowhere to be found, he stepped outside of the house to vomit.

When Georgie was twelve, a station wagon skidded on the ice and swerved into his father’s Tercel, crushing the car and half of his father, who bled into an irreversible coma before Georgie and his mother got to the hospital to see him. Because his mother had to be sedated at the news, he’d stood at his father’s bedside alone, staring at the body, the way the part beneath the sheet was unnaturally crumpled, the way his face began to look like melted wax, the way his lips remained slightly parted.

Georgie hadn’t known, at first, that the sisters would stick with him like that.

“What’s fucked up,” Georgie said to Jones two days after, “is that I wished for a minute it was our guys who did it, some psycho who lost it. The way that kid looked at me, like she really thought I came to save her. I don’t want to think about them coming for her family because we made them talk. I don’t want to be the reason they did her like that.”

“What’s the difference between you and some other asshole?” Jones said. “Either nobody’s responsible for nothing, or every last motherfucker on this planet is going to hell someday.”

After that, he’d turn around in the shower, the girls would be there. He’d be sleeping, and he’d open his eyes to see the little one hiding in the corner of his room. He was jumpy and too spooked to sleep. He told Ramirez about it, and Ramirez said you didn’t get to pick your ghosts, your ghosts picked you.

“Still,” he said. “Lieutenant sends you to talk to someone, don’t say that shit. White people don’t believe in ghosts.”

But he told the doctors everything, and then some. He didn’t care anymore what his file said, as long as it got him the fuck out of that place. And the truth is, right before the army let him go, sent him packing with a prescription and a once-a-month check-in with the shrink at the VA hospital, it had gotten really bad. One night he was sure the older girl had