A street light flickered in the thick Atlanta air as a thin woman fell face down onto the cold asphalt. The thick shape of a man leaned over her as if daring her to stand. Even by the partial light in the alley she could see the outline of his meticulously braided hair and pants that hung low on his thighs.
No one was there to see her, to help her. Only the man and his companions who stood off, watching.
She rolled and threw a punch with the precision of a fighter. He moved his face away so that the blow barely glanced his cheek, but failed to predict the kick to where the pants and the underwear met.
The other men moved in to hold her against a wall as the man doubled over with a string of explicatives. One of them punched her hard below the ribs to make her stop struggling. The pain was suffocating. The taste of the bile only made it harder to force the air back into her own chest. She couldn't escape.
It was over.
There was no hope.
“Hey! What are you doing there?” yelled a voice from the head of the alley. "I'm calling the police! They're on their way!" Just then a siren sounded in the distance, and the gangsters scattered into the night.
________________________________________
When the world stopped swirling a man was bending down over her. He kept talking, trying to get her attention. She blinked, and her body ached in protest when she tried to sit up. “Ugh…” she moaned.
“Try to be still. An ambulance is on its way,” said the man worriedly.
“Where are cough cough…” she could taste the blood in her mouth.
“Relax,” he encouraged through her coughs. “They’re long gone by now.”
“Good,” she whispered then with a tremble her body went limp. Frantically, the man checked for a pulse. She was still alive.
The police arrived first. After insuring that she wouldn’t die on the sidewalk before the ambulance arrived, they began to question the man. They asked about the woman first. Had he ever met her before? Did he think she might be involved in drugs? Did he know what she had been doing there? No, he answered to all.
Then they asked about the men, but he didn’t know anything about them either. He’d only gotten a brief glance at them from a distance. Two black, one white. All about average height. One of them had a tattoo of some sort on his arm. Not even enough for the police to I.D. them.
The ambulance finally arrived after what seemed like hours, and the medics hurried the woman onto a gurney and into the ambulance. The man thought he heard one of the EMTs say something about a broken rib. Then the door closed and the ambulance skidded off, sirens blaring.
He didn’t know who she was, or how she’d come to be there that night, but he hoped that she would be alright.
I'll probably never see her again though, he thought as he walked out onto the street.
He never heard any more from the police about the incident. Months later, when he looked back, he would wonder whether the surreal incident had been anything more then a strange and violent dream.
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