Somewhere between here and there was her bottle of codeine pills, upstairs on the floor of the ladies’ room she had left a little slip of paper headed ‘Extraction’; seven floors below, oblivious of the people who stepped sharply along the sidewalk, not noticing their occasional curious glances, her hand in Jim’s and her hair down on her shoulders, she ran barefoot through hot sand.

The Witch

The coach was so nearly empty that the little boy had a seat all to himself, and his mother sat across the aisle on the seat next to the little boy’s sister, a baby with a piece of toast in one hand and a rattle in the other. She was strapped securely to the seat so she could sit up and look around, and whenever she began to slip slowly sideways the strap caught her and held her halfway until her mother turned around and straightened her again. The little boy was looking out the window and eating a cookie, and the mother was reading quietly, answering the little boy’s questions without looking up.

‘We’re on a river,’ the little boy said. ‘This is a river and we’re on it.’

‘Fine,’ his mother said.

‘We’re on a bridge over a river,’ the little boy said to himself.

The few other people in the coach were sitting at the other end of the car; if any of them had occasion to come down the aisle the little boy would look around and say, ‘Hi,’ and the stranger would usually say, ‘Hi,’ back and sometimes ask the little boy if he were enjoying the train ride, or even tell him he was a fine big fellow. These comments annoyed the little boy and he would turn irritably back to the window.

‘There’s a cow,’ he would say, or, sighing, ‘How far do we have to go?’

‘Not much longer now,’ his mother said, each time.

Once the baby, who was very quiet and busy with her rattle and her toast, which the mother would renew constantly, fell over too far sideways and banged her head. She began to cry, and for a minute there was noise and movement around the mother’s seat. The little boy slid down from his own seat and ran across the aisle to pet his sister’s feet and beg her not to cry, and finally the baby laughed and went back to her toast, and the little boy received a lollipop from his mother and went back to the window.

‘I saw a witch,’ he said to his mother after a minute. ‘There was a big old ugly old bad old witch outside.’

‘Fine,’ his mother said.