Voyeur #2

            Her curls bob as she ducks and weave behind palm trees, their shadow casting over her small frame.  She calls out to her father who is wandering the square, a slight smile on his face.  Despite her young age, she is full of fire and grace, darting between dogs and scooters and striding past strangers marveling at her cuteness with a sassiness to rival Beyoncé’s.  A day in Piazza Cavour, cavorting among Italian government officials and student is a rare luxury for her.  She spends most of her days trapped between four walls, textbooks stacked higher than her torso and hands cramped from clutching a pencil for hours.  English conjugations are ingrained in her memory, mixed with European history and the Pythagorean Theorem.  Her eyes strain from looking at math problems and the tiny inch of blue sky peeking out of her window, a world she so desperately wants to explore but her father wants to keep contained.  After all, he wasn’t afforded the opportunity to study in his youth and wants to ensure his daughter can graduate college, an achievement he was never granted. He doesn’t notice her slumped figure when he brings over another division table or her clenched fist when he asks her to recite a line from The Divine Comedy.  He only sees the phantom college degree hung next to a postcard of Rome and his train tickets, the only possessions he owned when he fled the war.  She doesn’t understand how the blood congealed in the streets and the screams of children, haunting against the screech of gulls. She doesn’t understand how to load an AK-47 or how to make a bomb.  Her world is too innocent for war.  Instead, she’s caught in the sun-saturated piazza, content to run among the palm fronds and hide among the shadows.