Look Out for One Another

Venita Blackburn's 'Halloween' published in The New Yorker on August 5, 2021 is a chilling little story. What the three little girls experienced that afternoon, is what many little girls and boys face everywhere in the world at some point of their growing up years — the feeling danger and feeling unsafe even in a neighborhood or home that they know well.

Late afternoon on a week day, the unnamed narrator (no gender mentioned. It could be a boy, but I'll assume that it's a girl) and her friend Esperanza were riding home on their bicycles after jujitsu practice, and saw a car following a younger girl. It was pure luck that they had somehow saved a little girl from an unknown horrible fate.

To this day, I feel like perverts drive Hondas. The little girl had been out of our sight for too long, and the car too. I wasn’t afraid like Esperanza yet; it didn’t occur to me that I should’ve been until I saw her lean forward on her bike and begin to pedal past me. Sometimes it’s the witnessing of a horror story that makes us forget we’re in one. She pedalled for the life of the little girl and our own. I pedalled just to keep up. Back then, I couldn’t imagine the worst of us, those who take and take and stretch the tender parts of life to the point of breaking.

This very short story that is pretty much the length of an essay, gave me the heebies jeebies. Humans are evil, as extrapolated by the news headlines in every city in the world. Adults prey on one another, and go after the vulnerable, and children aren't spared. It's a horrible world we live in. If I were a parent, I wouldn't just want to raise kind kids. I'll be under a lot of pressure to raise street-smart kids who know how to protect themselves, surround themselves with decent friends and not meet horrific incidents and be caught in situations. 

Children look like easy prey. While they should enjoy their innocence and childhood, the current state of the world dictates that they have situational awareness, wariness towards strangers and even familiars, learn boundaries and draw a line between what makes them feel safe and what makes them uncomfortable, and preferably know basic self-defense. 

We stopped and held our ground while the girl made it to us and paused in between our bikes, looking over her shoulder as the car slowly approached. I wanted the car to careen into the curb, and then a corpse would stumble out of the passenger side and a greasy alien with a mouth like a lamprey eel and arms long as my whole body would burst from the windshield. But villains never look the way they should. Threats are often surprising and unannounced, so it takes a lot of people to protect one another, especially little girls. The car sped off, and, even though all of our eyes watched it go, we never saw the driver. Just like that we were alone, the three of us. The day faded fast right before the gold street lights lit up the sidewalk. We had the dusk to ourselves and moved again through time, exhausted, as if the shapes of the night could be anything we wanted.