It wasn't the best place to go for a walk, really. There were all these things that people had thrown away back there -- old cookers and broken dishes and dolls with no arms and legs and empty cans and broken bottles. Mum and Dad made me promise not to go exploring back there, because there were too many sharp things, and tetanus and such.
But I keep telling them I wanted to explore it. So one day my dad put on his big brown boots and his gloves and put my boots on me and my jeans and sweater, and we went for a walk.
We must have walked for twenty minutes. We went down this hill, to the bottom of a gully where a stream was, when my dad suddenly said to me, "Coraline -- run away. Up the hill. Now!" He said it in a tight sort of way, urgently, so I did. I ran away up the hill. Something hurt me on the back of my arm as I ran, but I kept running.
As I got to the top of the hill I heard somebody thundering up the hill behind me. It was my dad, charging like a rhino. When we reached me he picked me up in his arms and swept me over the edge of the hill.
And then we stopped and we puffed and we panted, and we looked back down the gully.
The air was alive with yellow wasps. We must have stepped on a wasps' nest in a rotten branch as we walked. And while I was running up the hill, my dad stayed and got stung, to give me time to run away. His glasses had fallen off when he ran.
I only had the one sting on the back of my arm. He had thirty-nine stings, all over him. We counted later, in the bath.
So later that afternoon my dad went back again to the wasteland, to get his glasses back. He said if he left it another day he wouldn't be able to remember where they'd fallen.
And soon he got home, wearing his glasses. He said that he wasn't scared when he was standing there and the wasps were stinging him and hurting him and he was watching me run away. Because he knew he had to give me enough time to run, or the wasps would have come after both of us.
And he said that wasn't brave of him, doing that, just standing there and being stung. It wasn't brave because he wasn't scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. THAT was brave."
"And why was that?" asked the cat, although it sounded barely interested.
"Because," she said, "when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave."
-- Excerpt from Coraline by Neil Gaiman
This part stayed with me until I finished the book. I get it now. I know it's hard being brave and all especially when you don't know what's coming. But just like Coraline and her father, I have to. Not just for me. For my family as well. It's the only thing I could do.
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