100-Word Fiction: ‘A Crossing (4)’

All is quiet. A little girl runs out into the street. She is smiling but her eyes say something different. From somewhere a man is shouting her name. Then a woman shouts it too. But she is looking at me, on the other side of the street. She stops, then steps towards me. The voices shout her name more urgently, louder. A sound on the rooftops. Then a man’s head, out of a doorway, and his thin body, rushing quickly into the street and swooping the girl up in his arms. They are shot down in a torrent of fire.