This little story is for Sue Vincent’s Thursday photo prompt.
They halted on the road because she was tired and the baby needed feeding. He looked back the way they had come nervously. There was only a line of low hills between them and the town. He’d have preferred a mountain range. Or an ocean.
“It’ll be fine,” she said as she settled down and undid the front of her robe. “He said nothing would happen to us.”
Her husband looked at the glow in the sky that meant the town had been torched. “Not to us, maybe.”
She looked up in irritation. “But we got out in time, and that’s the main thing.”
“He also said that this could happen again.”
She shrugged. “But we’ll be looked after, whatever happens.”
“Doesn’t it make you…uneasy?”
“Look,” she said wearily, “it’s unfortunate about…the others—”
“The babies,” he specified.
“All right! The babies! But it can’t be helped. He’s more important. Look at him,” she smiled down at her baby son. The child paused in his suckling and raised his head, fixing the worried-looking man with a piercing blue stare. “Now tell me you’d put his life at risk for a bunch of insignificant babies that were probably already more than their parents could cope with.”
Her husband tore himself away from the baby’s blue-eyed gaze and looked back at the mounting flames.
“I hope you’re right,” he said.
“Of course I am,” his wife said, fastening her robe and getting to her feet. “Now, hold Jesus while I get back on the donkey. We’re not out of the woods yet.”
