Free Found in Translation by Roger Bruner

wouldn’t approve of us sleeping together.”
    “I’m glad to hear that. I wouldn’t, either.”
    “But you don’t really plan to sleep on the bare ground, do you?” She must not have caught on yet that I didn’t have a choice.
    “I’d rather sleep standing up.” I didn’t mean to sound so serious. I was just tired.
    “White girls can do that?”
    Aware that she was teasing me as much as I was teasing her, I gave her a “black girls can’t?” look that was pretty convincing if I do say so myself. “Only when we’re tired of sitting down all day. But it helps if we have something to lean against. We’re not cows, sheep, or horses, you know.”
    I couldn’t keep from giggling then, and we laughed together. Several of our nearest neighbors peeked at us from their sleeping bags with an exhausted, “can’t you shut up and let us sleep in peace?” look in their half-closed eyes. But we were too tired to shut up, and they must have been too tired to verbalize their complaints.
    “Girl, we gotta find you something to sleep on before you start sleepwalking and trip over somebody important—like me.”
    I shrugged, clueless. For warmth, we could move closer to the fire, but the temperature wasn’t a problem. Softening the ground and making it clean enough to lie on? That was something else.
    “Hey!” she said. “That first truck brought bedding for the villagers, right? Maybe they didn’t take it all yet. We might find something lying around on the ground where they unloaded.”
    I had serious doubts about the villagers leaving anything usable lying around. Those folks wouldn’t be fussy. After all, they were starting housekeeping from scratch—without houses at that.
    “Come on.” Aleesha grabbed my elbow with one hand and a small flashlight with the other.
    If flashlights aren’t at the top of the list I’ve never seen, they should be.
    We picked our way carefully among sleeping bodies that sprawled out this way and that. When the girls cleared trash to lay out their sleeping bags, they filled the gaps between them like masons slathering concrete between bricks in a wall. Stepping on the girls would have been safer for us, although not for the girls.
    We must have spent ten or fifteen minutes reaching the cactus-less door to the field. I wouldn’t have wanted to make that trip without a flashlight.
    We clasped one another’s hands—black fingers intertwining with white, white with black—and giggled all the way to the tractor trailers.
    “When two friends hold hands while walking together,” Aleesha reworded the familiar scripture verse, sing-songing it in a little kid voice, “if one falls down and goes boom, they go boom together, and they can’t help one another up again because they’ll both be laughing too hard.”
    We spent twenty minutes checking the boxes on the ground. Nothing.
    The two eighteen-wheelers that had come with us contained building supplies. Only one of them was open, but we decided to check it anyhow. The floor of the trailer looked fifteen feet high. As short as I am, climbing up would be a literal exercise in futility. But Aleesha managed it easily, and she reached down and pulled me up.
    Yep, just construction materials. If worse came to worse, I could borrow a sheet of plywood to sleep on. I wouldn’t have to lie directly on the ground then. But as difficult as navigating among the sleeping girls had been, I could just see the two of us carrying a heavy sheet of plywood without bashing one or more girls in the head.
    Would I have to sleep in the truck? And be that far from the facilities? No way!
    Then Aleesha flashed her light on a small box near the door. There we found it—one lone blanket nearly hidden in the shadows. Somebody had apparently tossed it there—a reject. What better choice for someone like me who felt like a total reject in her teammates’ eyes?
    Will things be any better at the end of two weeks?
    “You seem down now,” Aleesha said after