A Dangerous Act of Kindness

by L.P. Fergusson

‘if you must, but I think you’re absolutely potty.’

This was just a dream and as his mother always said, dreaming was free and dreaming was fine – so long as you didn’t resent it if it never came true.

if you whistle it blows the onion fumes away and stops your eyes from watering.’

He’d cracked something open within her, something she knew had always been there, waiting. Now he was gone, leaving an empty socket of pain. She felt eviscerated and profoundly lonely. This final loss, so insignificant compared to losing a father, then a mother, then a husband, had ripped down all her strength, all her pluck.

We may be a reserved occupation but we’ve got our own battles to fight up here, Millie. The battle for food is every bit as important.’

Millie climbed the stairs. Already the house smelt different; cigarette smoke and a stale smell, like the inside of a biscuit tin mixed with cheap perfume. She wondered how long it would take for her to get used to it; or would these people absorb the smell of the country the longer they lived here?

As the hours passed, Lukas watched the countryside sliding by, glad to be on the move but feeling the distance between him and Millie expanding. How far could he travel before the thread that linked them broke?

It’s causing chaos in London you know, the aphrodisiac of imminent death.’

the human heart can only hold on to strong emotions for a limited length of time – love, hate, revenge, grief – and eventually all of them come to a natural end.

every now and then I come across a glimmer of hope, a flash of human decency and I wonder if our salvation lies not in politics, or treaties, but in individual acts of kindness, which are as inexplicable as the violence our country has unleashed upon the world.’

‘Hitler was right about the Thousand-Year Reich. It’ll take a thousand years before the world forgets what we have done.’