Sidewalk

From a car’s window, a gun pointing at my parents. It happened in the blink of an eye as they would later tell me. Before the blink they were there and the street and the trees and the sidewalk and their intentions and the morning sun and the asphalt and the power lines and the cloudless sky and the bread in my mom’s arms and the blink and the gun and everything sinking in their bodies. A white car, driving from down the street, stopping in the middle of it, evading their attention, they see it stopping, they see the gun. The unintelligible voice behind the gun coming from an unseen face. My dad said run and they ran. Dad ahead, mom behind. The pressure between the gun and the flesh in their backs moving their sixty years old legs. The gun imprinted in my mom’s mind. In my father’s, we don’t know. The sound of the car’s engine revving behind them. Dad turns right. Mom doesn’t follow. Twenty meters and then left. It’s early Saturday morning. Empty streets. There’s a building with a doorman if she turns left. She cries for help. The gate opens, her words find no order between short breaths. She is given water. Dad turns right in an empty street. Only sleeping houses. Ducked behind a bush, holding his backpack. The gun passing by him in the white car. It goes fast. Why didn’t they see him. Maybe they caught mom. He picks up his phone. He calls her. Mailbox. They must have caught her. He calls again. He realises he called the wrong number before. He calls the right number, she picks up. The gun, its weight on their back, on my mom’s thoughts as she imagines being shot while running. The weight of the gun while she sees my dad’s back, while her legs don’t fail her. The weight of the gun moving her where she wasn’t going, forking her path from my dad’s. The chance of survival doubling, the car failing to split in two, the bullet unable to follow two paths.