"How old are you, exactly, Carmen?"
The girl raised her tousled red haired head, and looked the vicar in the eye, but said nothing. It wasn't her way to answer questions.
The vicar stared at the girl in front of him, dressed from head to foot in black mourning clothes, and wondered how a child could possibly be quite so strange and silent. "Your age?" he repeated.
Carmen considered the question. She wished people could be more direct with questions. Did he mean how long since she had been born, or how old she felt? She felt very, very old. She felt dead inside.
"Thirteen." She said, quietly. The vicar sighed.
"So young...Well, you know the one which we have lost are still with us, in our hearts. And you know God is looking after them."
Carmen didn't believe a word of this. She thought the vicar was a fool. He talked so much but seemed to say very little.
The vicar cleared his throat, slightly disconcerted by the constant stare of the soundless child. He smiled weakly at her. "Well, I'll...er...be going then. Keep yourslef well, Carmen. And say your prayers!" And with that, he ran off, along the graveyard path and through the huge wooden front doors of the church. Carmen did not watch him leave.
She walked forward, and placed a hand on the small stone slab in front of her. She shut her eyes. She could feel the wind from the sea whipping her hair against her face, and could hear it rustling through the evergreens that surrounded the graveyard. She could smell those trees, and she could smell the ocean; a piney, salty smell that mingled together. With her eyes shut, she could see nothing; but the sunlight pressed against her eyelids, making the darkness somehow brighter.
She could feel the edges of the stone beneath her fingers, and she clutched it hard, as her eyes grew hot and she had to press them tightly shut so as to stem the flow of tears.
She hated that this was the closest she could get. She missed her father so, so much. She clutched the stone even harder, so hard it hurt, trying to imagine the rough edges as her father's hands. But she could not do it. She opened her eyes. He was gone. All that bile the vicar had spouted about him being in her heart was lies. Her heart felt as empty as the rest of her.
She turned away from the stone slab, and started to walk along the graveyard path, the opposite direction to the one the vicar had taken. The funeral had ended half an hour ago. The villagers had left to visit the Inn and gossip. Carmen wondered what they would be saying. She hated all the villagers.
She opened the small wooden gate, and slipped through it. Then she turned and ran down the road, her black shoes spewing rubble behind her. She ran around the edges of the houses, past the mill, with its smell of bread and flour, and past the old lighthouse, its windows broken and the door crooked, and all the way along the road down to the beach path.
She ran down it until she came to a bank, covered in stones and grass, and picked her way down. She came to halt at the bottom, and stared ahead of her, catching her breath.
The sea moved in front of her, the noise of it filling her ears. The pebbled beach stretched out along the side of the island, off past Eagle Cliff in the distance. She walked forward, into the sea, and stood there, the water lapping against her ankles.
Slowly, the emotions insie of her built up and up, until they were pressing in on her from all sides. He was gone, gone, she would never see him again. Never. How could he have gone? Why him, why him?
She arched her neck, stared up into the clear blue sky, and screamed.
