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Children on the Side of Milk Cartons

By Jann Segal

She ran as fast as she could after the black car stopped on the side of the busy street on that sunny summer day, and four adult strangers opened their doors and invited her inside. Her mother had  always warned her  to run from strange men if that ever happened. But two men were in the front and two women in the back, egging her to enter the car. She had heard about the darkness of bad men. But were there bad women too?

This stroll down the street was an independent interlude for her. At thirteen years old, she had joined her mother at the hair salon to meet her mother’s hairdresser who had a talented niece with a great voice. They thought perhaps the two could form an adolescent duet, which they did for several years. As she kept running and trying to figure out what to do and if she could run across the even busier cross street and back to the safety of her mother and the hair salon, she had no idea that she would eventually, and not that long into the future, become so fluent with intricate and complex guitar stylings, that she would be good enough to consider becoming a professional session musician. But on this day, and in that circumstance, all she knew was that she wanted to find safety and hoped the streetlight timing was on her side. She hoped nobody was following her and was afraid to look behind. She just kept running.