Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

"We met a woman named Shayla,” began one of the kids, the surfer punks. “She’s the one you maybe saw on the news — her baby was crawling down the street at two in the morning.”

Yes, we had all seen Shayla’s story on the news. There was a party in her grandma’s house where she lived, and grandma was out of town, and Shayla’s one-year-old baby had somehow made her way out of the house, down the sidewalk and into the street. The motorist who almost ran over her stopped and shot video of her toddling down the street before he called 911. He wasn’t sure where the baby belonged; she had actually managed to get several houses down from her own home. It was this amateur video they played on the news: the dark tarmac, the white stripe down which the baby in the white t-shirt and diaper was hastening on hands and knees. It was awful, there was no doubt of that. Pretty awful.

Shayla’s defense had been: “None of you think something like this can happen to you if you’re a good parent, but it can. Sh-t happens.” This did not endear her to the public.

As soon as the Dunker punk told us he had met Shayla, mother of the runaway baby, the walls went up. None of us would ever have let a toddler crawl down the street at night! But Torstein’s look of excited expectation never changed. He nodded and encouraged the boy to go on.

“She’s had a terrible time since that video. Child Protective Services is making her go to classes and have inspectors in her home at all hours of the day and night, plus they actually gave custody of the baby to the grandma, so unless Shayla completes the classes, she can’t get her daughter back, legally. And everyone who saw her on the news comes down on her hard. Bad mother, you’re a bad mother, that’s what everyone tells her. How do you think that feels?”

“She is a bad mother.” Ferdy said. But all of us were thinking it. Of course she’s a bad mother!

“Well, yeah,” the kid said. “But if you’ve got a big nose and everyone keeps telling you that, does it make you feel any better just because it’s the truth? She knows she’s a bad mother, but she doesn’t need everyone telling her that.”

“She never admitted she was a bad mother!” Franz said. “She basically said it was just one of those things. Could happen to anyone.”

“It’s all right,” Torstein said. “She doesn’t have to say she’s a bad mother. Go on, Kurt.”

The Dunker punk nodded.

“What she said, to us, was: there’s no love in this neighborhood for me anymore. I want to move, but unless I finish all the classes, I can’t take my daughter with me. I’m stuck here unless I leave her.”

“What did you say?” Torstein asked.

“I told her that somehow, love was the answer to her equation.” He smiled. “She said, ‘My what?!’ And so I told her the answer to her problem. All we had to do was figure out how love was the answer.”

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