In the same ordinary town, on the same ordinary street, two ordinary households were watching the sidewalk with fear and trepidation. They were waiting for their children—their ordinary, everyday, predictable children—to come home. They had been waiting for hours. They felt like they had been waiting for years.
How surprised they would have been, those children, if they had been able to see the fear on their parents’ faces, the way they scanned the distance in every possible direction, the way their hands shook as they held tightly to whatever they could find! It was easy to believe their parents had other concerns to keep them occupied. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Unaware of how far their children had gone, or how far they had left to go, their parents watched, and waited, and hoped for a quick and easy ending, the sort of tidy thing that only ever comes in stories, and so rarely graces us here, in the real world, where real costs can be incurred, and real prices must be paid.
They would be waiting for a very long time.