Departure
opening excerpt
The fear was a living thing.
It swelled, icy and fierce within her, and throughout the crowd as it surged against the concrete wall before her. Atop the wall, uniformed guards stood between them and the runway where the military transport aircraft waited, its massive turbines idling.
The crescendo of voices was deafening, and she worried about the wailing infant girl she clutched at her breast and the son who clung to her arm. She had been standing in the crowd for so long that she had lost all sense of time. Her attempts to be seen and heard in a seemingly endless sea of despairing cries had failed. There were thousands of people here, and they were all asking for the same thing: to be spirited away from their homeland, their people, their families in the hope of finding safety a world away. Better to chance the unknown in a distant country than to stay put. The certainty of what awaited her here, in her own birthplace, urged her to keep moving her tired feet toward the front of the mob.
She had been jostled and pushed, stepped on and shouted at. She had lost her husband a few hours back, separated by a great tide of people forcing their way forward. She wanted to find him, but she could not let her children down: she had to weave her way to that wall, and knew he would support her in her efforts. There had to be a way to save their children. She could not live with the pain if she did not, and she knew she might not live at all if she could not make it to the men with guns, shouting for the crowd to keep back.
Her son began to cry, and it became clear that the lack of a bathroom had taken its toll at last, when the boy pointed to the puddle near his feet. She hugged her son to let him know it was all right, her heart bursting with a love that was overshadowed by her terror. She might be in a similar situation soon, and her baby had long since soiled her diaper. She did not have any fresh changes on hand - they had left everything that was not in immediate reach at home, dashing at the opportunity to board this last plane to freedom.
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