We turn the corner.
A woman screams.
She’s Mediterranean. Maybe. Mid-Forties. Long black hair wearing a print dress. It’s black with small pink flowers sprinkled on it. Her back is to us.
And she’s screaming.
We try and take in the scene. We’re coming around the corner to take the down escalator. She’s coming up the other side. She just got on. But there’s mayhem. In a second we realize what’s happening.
A guard lunges toward the escalator. It’s a woman. Chinese. She’s in her late twenties. Maybe. She doesn’t reach for the stop button which doesn’t make sense to me I remember thinking later. She’s panicking. She dives over a tangled mess of fabric and metal that’s too hard to make out as we start our descent.
A small girl, maybe 4 years old is dragged to her feet by the guard from the tangle. We breathe again. She’s okay.
But the woman is still screaming. I don’t recall her inhaling yet.
As the scene approaches us we see it clearly now. Our blood freezes. It’s a baby stroller and it’s on it’s side. Whatever was in it would have been thrown into the gap between the side and the stairs. That place where they warn you about.
The guard see’s it and abandons the older girl. We lose sight of her for a moment. Then it’s over. She surfaces with a pink and screaming toddler in her arms.
The mother was screaming so loudly that we couldn’t hear the baby but it’s face was contorted in an all too familiar baby wail.
This entire scene played out in no more than 5 seconds on an escalator somewhere in Hong Kong.
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