A Small Free Kiss in the Dark by Glenda Millard

on top of Max, pinning his arms to his sides and Billy knelt beside him, stroking his hair, talking quietly. Someone else came and sat next to us. I couldn’t see who it was till Billy put his torch on. It was the eyebrow woman. She felt Max’s forehead and pulled back his eyelids.
    ‘He’s dreaming, poor lamb,’ she said. ‘Night Terrors, that’s what it is. He’ll be fine in a minute.’
    At last I felt Max stop fighting, and I moved off him. He opened his eyes and tears rolled down his cheeks.
    ‘When will Mummy come, Skip?’
    I didn’t know if God would listen to the prayers of a thief, and I didn’t know if you could undo prayers once you’d said them, but I tried. I even offered to do a deal with God. I said if Max’s mum came through the door I’d put the books back on the shelves. I didn’t want Max to be like me, always looking and never finding.

7
    Albert Park
    Most people believe their mother will come for them when she says she will. They don’t think of all the reasons why she mightn’t be able to, especially the reason of war. It isn’t a thing you think will happen to you, especially when you’re six years old. It’s an unlikely event . Max thought about his mother the way other people think about the sun; because it was there yesterday, it would shine again tomorrow.
    ‘She’s gone shopping,’ he told us on the first day. ‘She goes shopping at night after work. I stay here at the library until she comes back, and I don’t go outside. Sometimes she buys me fish fingers for my dinner.’
    On the second day he said, ‘She might come tomorrow.’ And when she didn’t come again, he said, ‘She might come next Tuesday.’
    After a few days, Max and me thought of a plan to find his mum. Max had a photo of her stuck in his book. In the mornings, before people went away to find food, Max and me showed everyone the photo. Max carried the book and I did the talking. ‘This is Max’s mum,’ I’d say. ‘If you see her anywhere, would you please tell her that Max is still waiting in the library?’
    Cecily, the eyebrow lady, thought it was a great idea. We showed the photo every day in case the old people forgot what Mrs Montgomery looked like, and for the new arrivals.
    Most days someone new came. Some of them brought pots and pans and blankets and tiny gas burners like the ones people take camping. They arranged chairs and desks like cubbyhouses. It was always cold. Wind gusted through the holes in the walls and people hacked pieces off the carpet and burnt them to keep warm.
    Max was brave. He only cried at night, and he cried quietly. I wouldn’t have known he did it, except one night I felt his hands wiping the tears off his cheeks. Sometimes I had to think about my overcoat list or do my visualisation technique because it’s a difficult circumstance when you’ve got a small boy crying quietly beside you and you don’t know what to do. I hated the quiet crying even more than the screaming nightmares that he had almost every night.
    I shifted the art books to higher ground when the toilets started flushing backwards. After about a week, the water stopped altogether and the smell got so bad that people started moving out. Some said the smell was coming from the toilets. Others said it was the bodies of the people who’d been killed when the front of the library collapsed. People argued about everything. The Friends of the Library stopped coming, although there were still thousands of books on the shelves.
    ‘We’ve got to find somewhere else soon, Skip,’ Billy said.
    He didn’t have to tell me that. Every morning another building had disappeared from the horizon. They weren’t all bombed; some just crumpled quietly, like a pair of jeans with no legs in them, because there was nothing to hold them up.
    I looked at Max, who was drawing in his book. ‘What are we going to tell Max?’
    Billy shrugged his shoulders. ‘The truth, he’ll have to get used to it.’
    After that,