Page 8 of Raven

It’s that kid, the one Kai and Callie brought from Port Mrei. He snoops around Ayana like a sparrow with no business other than knowing everything about every single person.

He is the first one to ever find me here, and as I watch his little clumsy figure running away toward the steep slope of Ayana’s villas, I tuck the knife back into my pocket.

I don’t care what the kid does around here, but he needs to stay out of my business. He used to be homeless. So was I. But he is too little to understand than sometimes it’s a matter of seconds and a wrong move that decide a life-or-death scenario.

I know, I’ve been there, eight years ago, when a man I pulled a gun on saved my life.

4

RAVEN

Seconds—I can’t even tell you how many times in my life a few seconds decided my fate.

Every thirty seconds, a violent crime is committed in the US.

Every twenty seconds, blood circulates through your entire vascular system.

Your heart pumps a quart of blood in twelve.

You blink every four.

Your heart pumps every second. And in that one heartbeat, there are, on average, four babies born around the world, and two people die.

Malcolm “Mac” Wright saved my life in sixty seconds. Not literally, but that’s semantics.

I was nineteen, a year after the release from juvie, ten months of living in condemned houses, rooming with other drug dealers. That fateful day of our encounter, I was running from the police and hid in his backyard in the shittiest part of town.

He walked out the back door of the house, a stranger, a giant of a man, his short afro gray, his gaze on me curiously calm.

“Wanna make things worse, son?” He nodded at the gun I pulled on him.

That last word made me halt. Perhaps, that moment of stupor was what saved me then, or him. But again, semantics.

His eyes calmly studied the gun in my hand. “I won’t care. I’ve been through it all. You? It’s only a matter of time until you catch a bullet yourself.”

The police sirens blasted past his house. My heart in my stomach, I smirked. “I have nothing to lose, old man.”

Mac only looked at the sky, then said something that surprised me. “It’s about to start raining.” He squinted at the heavy clouds. “I have a stir-fry ready. If you feel like you want to stop running for a bit, I’ll be inside.”

With that, he turned around and walked back into his house.

It takes a special sort of heart to be able to stare at a desperate man with a gun and see hopelessness instead of violence. And it takes a lot of faith in mankind to say, “Let’s talk.”

I was stunned. For the first time, someone looked at me like I was a human and not a piece of shit.

Sixty seconds was how long it took between me angrily pulling my gun on him and awkwardly walking into his house.

That night, Mac fed me and gave me a bed. I talked for hours, and he listened. No one had cared about listening to me before. They called him “Father Mac,” though he was no preacher and had no kids of his own. I came to find out later that he “saved” people like me.

A sixty-something-year-old man and a nineteen-year-old fuckup was a strange set of friends. In retrospect, Mac was and still is my best friend. The closest thing I have to a father. Definitely a mentor. He helped me clean up, taught me not to talk like a thug. Because of him, I could safely walk through the hood he lived in and not be afraid to be the only white guy around. Guys spat on the ground seeing me, but the rumor that I was “one of Mac’s” kept them from drawing knives on me.

“Dealing drugs won’t get you out of trouble,” Mac said one time, though never told me to stop.

“I don’t know how to do anything else,” I replied bitterly.

“Are you good at dealing drugs?”

I laughed. He wasn’t joking, though.

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