It was a dark night, and I was walking with the few who mattered: my mother and her younger sister, my favorite auntie. She had a shawl on, an italian shawl, that she had picked up for a pretty penny. She adored that scarf, and the reason was unknown to me. She wrapped it tighter around her face, and a sudden glimpse into her life I imagined. A youth, a wonderful youth where stared at she had been, for she had been beautiful until that fateful day in August, 1979. I was not born then, but I had heard many conflicting stories that chilled my blood.
This night was glorious, warm enough that I did not get gooseflesh as I always do when walking in a strange city, but with a smoky haze encouraging me along the path that is so spoken against in this middle-class society in which I live.
Tonight was clarity, I could see myself more clearly than ever before, I was young but not a child, and not yet a woman. One day soon, I would be the leader on this road, and not the follower as was my place tonight. I did not mind, for there was a spring in my step and a laugh on my lips.
A child wandered across our path, a boy of almost eight, and I realized that this might be an omen, for I had dreamt of such a moment two nights previous. In my dream he had been snatched into the darkness by foul hands, and I wondered if this was not an omen but perhaps just the result of too much ham and pepperoni flat bread pizza.
I didn't want to find out if my dream was right, so I quickly spoke to little boy, and asked him where, oh where, where were his parents? It turns out that he was lost, and I took it upon myself to save this little boy from the fate of a youth spent in a dreary orphanage.
I didn't want him to be mistreated or abused, and a thousand images of distress flooded into my mind, with a gasp, I dispelled them and turned my mind to the task at hand -- to save this young lad from a youth not far from my own, one of shared horror.
I asked him his name, and it was Pepe. Little pepe liked to eat, and he asked me for food. Luckily I was carrying a little stick of beef jerky, that I had purchased from a grocery store in my hometown of Ottawa. I was constantly chewing on beef jerky, and now was the perfect opportunity to use it for a good cause. To the delight of Pepe I fed him, and he became talkative.
"Oh miss thank you, do you know where my mama is?" whimpered the little Pepe who I had come to adore in only a few moments. An instant passing in real-time, but a thousand years of heart-breaking sorrow passing in my mind.