the littlest hearts

“This dress is itchy,” Marta whispered, squirming in her seat. “When’s this gonna be over?” Her mother placed a hand firmly on Marta’s shoulder, steadying her, and glared at her sternly. They were seated in the front row, and behind the podium, and an unfamiliar but important-looking man in a funny-colored suit had been talking for far too long.

They’d been up before the sun that morning, because Mama had insisted that Marta have a bath, and hauling up the water was hard work. Then, for over an hour, Marta had been forced to sit still in the lukewarm water, while Mama yanked the knots out of her hair and did the best she could to hide the worst ones within her long braid. Marta’s neck grew stiff and her eyes watered, but Mama had explained that it was very important that she look her best for the ceremony.

“What ceremony?” Marta asked sleepily. Mama had explained it before, but Marta still wasn’t sure she understood. Even if she did, she liked hearing her mother talk about it.

“Ah, Marta,” Mama said with a tired chuckle. “You know what today is. You’ve been selected out of all the children to be a symbol.”

“A symbol of what?” Marta asked, scrubbing at a stubborn patch of dirt on her right knee.

“Sit still,” Mama scolded. “You’re our future, Marta, you and all of the children in the neighborhood. They’re building the new school for you, so that you can have a better future.”

Marta shuddered involuntarily at the word school. Elya had told her all about school. Elya was her friend from the next street over. She was eight years old and very smart, smarter than Marta because she’d been alive three years more. She told Marta that school was awful. When you went to school, you couldn’t play anymore, or help Mama with the housework and the cooking. You had to sit still in one place for hours, listening to a grown-up and answering questions, learning to write and do numbers. It sounded awful. And, Elya said, the school was boiling hot in the sun and freezing on the grey, rainy days. The roof leaked and the coal smelled so bad you that the warmth it gave came at a price—your ability to breathe. They learned to count, Elya claimed, by counting the rats in the traps at the end of each day.

The man in the funny-colored suit had been talking forever, it seemed, talking about “children” and “the future of our nation”, about “innovation” and “hope” and “revitalization”. All these big words that Marta didn’t understand. Suddenly Mama was pushing her out of her seat, and she heard the man say, “I’d like to bring to the stage Marta Grifken. Marta will be one of the first children to attend the new school.”

Amid the blinding eruption of flashbulbs and a rippling of applause, Marta made her way cautiously up the ramp to the stage. The man was grinning broadly, and he bent down and lifted Marta easily around the waist and set her down on a stool that put her just at the right level of the microphone.

“Miss Grifken,” the man said, “can you tell us what you want to do when you’re a grown woman like your mother?”

Marta took a deep breath and looked out over the crowd, before locking her eyes on Mama in the front row. “I wanna be a doctor,” she said her voice gaining strength as she spoke, “because then I can make sure no one else has to miss their papa like I do.”

The room fell still and silent for a moment, before the man spoke again. “The littlest hearts hold the biggest dreams. Thank you, Marta.”

In the front row, Mama was crying.