Too Big

How would you explain it? Tucking her in at night, checking under the bed for monsters, explaining that lives end, that sometimes the borders we build are breached by things we can’t control. Tell her not to be scared? I said the man they’d found was old, though I didn’t know if he was. I told her that he was homeless, which I also didn’t know. I had to construct some difference, some border between him and us. The truth is too big: some day I will die, and Abbie’s world will expand past whatever limits I protect her with.