Out Alone at Night

She stepped out of the night in front of me and I did not know what to say. I had expected something like this ever since I’d first seen her, three days before, walking alone down by the river as the day faded into the grey of a late summer evening.

Tonight, though, I did not expect to see her, not here, alone like this.

Around here, it is not like the city; especially the cities these days, where it is too dangerous for anyone to be out alone. Here, far away from the cities it is still safe to go out at night and to go out alone.

We have no gangs that roam our streets, searching for victims, patrolling the edges of their territories looking for other gangs to take on in their war against what it used to mean to be human.

Out here, we still like to believe that we hold onto the few remaining bare threads of what used to be a civilisation. Out here we, still try to care about each other. Out here in the dark countryside we still like to believe there is something worthwhile in being human.

No, I did not expect to see her out here because she had – I’d learnt from local gossip – escaped from some distant burning city a few days before; barely escaped with her life was the story I’d been told.

Now here she was standing in front of me, her one arm in a dirty sling and limping towards me.

I knew what she wanted of me, what she was going to ask me to do. I knew she had been forced to leave her child behind in that burning city and that she wanted someone to take her back and save her child.

I knew that the person she wanted was me and I had no power to refuse her and still I did not know what to say when, eventually, she told me that the missing child was my child too.