Melons And Bandaids

It comes at me like a flush of blood in my head, like a rush of energy pulsing quickly through its paces; something I must catch like a dragonfly speeding across summer water.  It's always summer here.  In this one memory.  The only one I have from the time I was born until the time I turned five and a half, when my sister was born.

It feels like the corners of these images are crusted and thumbed carelessly by small fingers.

There is a concrete path that leads around the huge Victorian house, old, and cracked.  I see a posse of kids, kids of all ages, coming down this path in a kind of jungle cloud of dirty faces and secondhand clothing, a child stampede of careless gait.  They are tripping over each other and laughing.  I don't know where they're headed.  Just to the front of the house.  That's the limit of my vision.  Because that's as far as they get.  Then a white haired girl trips and falls.

Her knee is bleeding and she is scared.  She looks around for some kind of authority.  Like mommy or daddy.  Or someone who can help.  The blood is oozing quietly,as blood is wont to do, down her pale leg and the children all seem to be looking for a leader too.  An adult.  The lack of adult always feels so ominous and conspicuous when I watch.  Again. 

I don't recognize the faces or ages of the other kids.  The white haired child with the bleeding knee is me.  I know it's me because she's the only one who is fleshed out and real.  She's the only one that animates herself in my hollow memory, this one, this only one.

All the children decide to take charge together.  A soldier down means they must be brave and keep Angelina from crying.  She's going to cry.  She's got tears.  She's scared.  They usher her inside the big house to the children's quarters.  A strange room with no privacy, just cubbies, like endless bunks, in which the children all sleep.  The eldest children take her to their room of cubbies; like a room filled with little wombs in which to spin honey or grow wings.  I don't know what weird world this is. 

The older kids find bandaids and get a bowl of water and a washcloth because they are older and know what to do when adults are nohwere to be found.  They know that you clean a scraped knee and cover it.  I remember feeling my tears welling up.  I remember the soothing noises the other children made.  I was surrounded by grubby kids, circling the wounded soldier, mismatched clothes. Dirty wrinkled and wild, they hovered around me.  I felt almost more frightened being in the center of a circle of people than I did of the pain. 

One of the older children went off and found melon, brought cool slices in a bowl for me to eat.  Slapped the reaching greedy hands; the grabbing chubby fingers, insisting that I eat some first. Everyone knows that melon is cooling to wounds.  That melon is just the thing to divert a chest from exploding with tears.  I remember the sticky melon on my fingers.  The feeling of dirt on my legs.  Water diluting blood.  Children everywhere.  A fear lingering underneeth my pale thin skin.  A fear that no adults exist.  That the answer to the universe is sticky melon and that we were all we had.  Like a wild pack of dogs, scrapping for bandaids and melon.

Something in my chest still hurts every time I unearth this lone memory.  Something hurts so bad about the tenderness of the older children being parents to us younger ones.  Something so wrong that they were filling such responsible roles, yet they are such children as I remember them.  Such small beings, even the older ones, being responsible, giving care, beating hearts thumping like thunder to watch the smaller ones bleed and answering emergency with bandaids and melon.