Until Things Are Safe

I picked up a small stone from the pebbley river shore and threw it out into the water. I'd been in Kirpe for a week now, and I didn't like it. There was nothing to do. No friends, no pets, just books that I guessed hadn't been read for decades. Before my family and I moved into the old house just outside of the tiny village of Kirpe, I used to have a dog, but he was put down for cancer a few days before we packed our things into the moving truck. I used to have two friends, too, called Coco and Jen, but they decided that I wasn't good enough to hang out with them anymore almost a month before we moved.

So there I was, a lonely teenager in a lonely town in the countryside, tossing pebbles into a river. If you looked up "depressed" in the dictionary, you'd probably find my name, Millie Feilds. I lay back on the grass and closed my eyes, feeling the warm afternoon sun on my face... I found myself waking in the darkness, not realizing that I had fallen asleep, and sat up. It was somewhere around midnight, judging from how high up the moon was in the dark sky. This was bad, this was very much bad. I remember what my mother had said, the first night we'd slept in our new home in Kirpe:

"Things have changed now, Millie. We're not in Polikut anymore, we're in Kirpe. And in Kirpe, we have rules. You don't go out at night, you don't turn on the lights at night, and you have to come back to the house by five. There are horrible things happening, Millie. That's why we have to bolt all the doors shut at night." I had told her that it was stupid at the time, but after a few days I began to appreciate how lucky we were to have a place like ours, out in the country. Leaving our old home in the city of Polikut wasn't too bad, because we recieved news the morning after Mum had spoken those words that Polikut had been bombed, and our old home destroyed. The news wasn't too shocking, we had been expecting something like that. Things like this happened during wars.

I leapt up onto my feet and ran through the shadows along the river towards the footbridge, hoping that the night would conceal me. Then I heard something at made me feel like my blood had turned to ice. Gunshots. I sprinted the last few metres to the bridge, and ran across, forgetting how much noise this would make. I also forgot that you musn't run across the old footbridge, but I was quickly realized my mistake when my foot broke through a plank a plank of wood. More gunshots fired in the night, and I heard screams coming from the direction of the village. As I attempted to pull my foot out of the aperture in the bridge, I realized with dread that my foot was stuck. I saw a figure appraching in the moonlight, and I felt tears rising to my eyes. I didn't want to die, but I knew that what I wanted didn't matter in this war. The figure took the shape of a young man. Carrying a gun.

I screamed, barely hearing the sound escape my mouth. When the soldier reached me, however, he didn't shoot hs gun, though it would've been easy just to kill me there and then. Instead, he broke away the parts of the bridge that were trapping my foot, leaving only a few large splinters in my ankle. He grabbed my hand and pulled me over the side of the footbridge. We landed in the shallows and he dragged my to the little place where the bridge met the shore. He sat me down and looked into my eyes.

"Stay here until things are safe." he told me in a heavily accented voice, though I couldn't put my finger on what sort of accent it was. I nodded my head, and as he leaves I pull my knees up to my chest and bur my face my knees, not knowing if I will live to see the sun again.