Traffic never stops anymore. It slows in the wee hours, but at three in the morning I can’t count more than 50 breaths before the roar of an engine accompanies my heartbeat, the music of my dreams. I wonder what all that noise does to me. Us. Our thinking. Our dreaming. Us.

Two years ago today I heard a child screaming at 2:58 in the morning. There were four screams, each one fainter than the one before. I opened the window to listen and to study the shadows and I stayed there until 3:30. Cars hissed up and down the street and rumbled on the freeway, but no flashlights illuminated the dark street or the darker woods. No voices called out, “Where are you, child?”

My husband attributed the cries to a nightmare. The screams had been from a young one, maybe two or three. They were high-pitched, the last one broken into pieces by gasps.

The next week I walked the woods, looking for a piece of clothing, a shoe, blood, a bone, a body. I watched for the child, certain I would recognize him or her. I spent time beside playgrounds, hoping I might recognize the voice disguised as a shout of victory or a defiant, “Did too!”

I reimagine the night. I get out of bed, throw on clothes and race into the darkness with a flashlight, calling out, “Where are you? I’m here. To help. To save you.”

And then the Syrian migrants became front page news. So many of them. Children. In crowded boats. That is when I saw the child I’d heard that night. Drowned and lying on a beach in Greece. I recognized him even from so many miles away. And I wept for all that I did not do to save him.

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Debra Lynn Turner’s body of work includes short fiction, poetry, a one-act play, and three novels. Her short story, Foam, was a runner-up in a Rosebud Magazine Imaginative Fiction Contest. Debra’s work has also appeared in Soundings Review, Trajectory Journal, Edge, and DoveTales.

Photo: Tim Marshall