Kimba

I heard her crying in the night. I was walking home from another late night at the office and the last thing I needed was to deal with some vagrant. The homeless had become so numerous in our city that I hardly even noticed them anymore. I continued walking up the hill to the brownstone where I shared a flat with three roommates and I thought to myself, at least the homeless have personal space. As I turned the corner onto my street, I saw the source of the echoing cries and stopped short. Standing under a scraggly tree that had grown twisted and warped from lack of sunlight was a woman barefoot in a simple slip dress. She was holding her arm and sobbing profusely.

Under normal circumstances I would’ve avoided her, gangs were always coming up with new tactics to trap unsuspecting victims. But there was something about her, an ageless innocence. I looked around for any signs of a domestic dispute, why else would she be out on the street in her pajamas? She hadn’t noticed me up until this point and so I decided to approach cautiously. I shot a quick text to one of my roomies, telling her to track my phone if I wasn’t home in a half hour. As I got closer to her, she looked up at me and I was stunned. Her face was smudged, and tear stained, she looked like she had climbed through a rose bush and landed in an ash pile. Even in this state, she was obviously beautiful. Her dark almond shaped eyes glowed in the night and her pouty lips were pink against her pale skin. I finally found my words and asked her if she needed any help, did she live in the area, and what was her name? She spoke in a halting lilting voice.

“I…I don’t know…”, she whispered.

“What’s your name?” I asked again. She seemed really out of it; I pulled my cell out again dialing 911… this was definitely a job for professionals.

“My name…?”, she asked.

“Yes, what should I call you?” I continued.

“Kim..ba..”, she sputtered.

“Kimba?”, I rolled the strange name around in my mind as I pressed call button.

I explained the situation to the operator, and she said she would dispatch an ambulance and a social worker. I texted my roommate again, letting her know that the paramedics had arrived and that I was going to have to answer a few questions. The entire time they talked to her, Kimba just looked dazed and confused. We couldn’t figure out who she was or where she came from. They decided to transport her to a nearby hospital and promised me to keep me updated. There was nothing left for me to do, so I went home.

The next day I swung by the hospital to check on Kimba. The nurse told me that she had been admitted with a sprained arm and some minor scratches. The most interesting thing about her condition was that she seemed to have symptoms of smoke inhalation. Nobody had been able to pin down where she had come from or why she was hurt. The nurse let me into her room but warned me that she needed her rest, she’d been up all night.

When I walked into the dimly lit hospital room Kimba was sound asleep. I sat and watched her for a little while, not really knowing what to do. I turned on the TV and flipped through the channels, settling on the local news. I kept the volume low, but the flickering of the screen caused her stir. I turned to find her eyes trained on me, bright and intelligent, but haunted by her ordeal and full of overwhelming exhaustion.

“Hi, I just wanted to make sure that you were okay”, I said haltingly.

“Thank you”, was all she said.

We continued this trend over the next couple of days. I would go to the hospital and we would sit and watch TV together or I would watch her sleep. One day as I was flicking through the channels, we came to the local news again. They were reporting on another wildfire. As we watched, I noticed that Kimba became visibly emotional, but she didn’t share any information and I didn’t ask. The nurse had told me that she might be a victim human trafficking and that she might be experiencing PTSD, it was best not press her and let her open up on her own. Her arm was doing a lot better and she seemed to be recovering quickly. Still, no one knew what to do with her once she recovered. There were a few women’s shelter associated with the hospital, but none of them were willing or able to take in a mononymous woman with no public record. I worried for her. It had been nearly a week since she’d mysteriously appeared, and I felt like we weren’t getting any closer to getting her home.

I arrived at the hospital late that Friday, one week after meeting Kimba. I waved past the nurses and headed into her room. Her privacy curtain was drawn but the window was open. I greeted her from the doorway to make sure she was decent but didn’t get a response. I walked over to the curtain and pulled it back only to find the bed was empty. I hurried to the nurse’s desk, fearing she had been released but she was as surprised as I was. We walked back into Kimba’s room and found no trace of her. I sat down at the end of her bed and stared at the pillow where she had laid every day for the past week. I felt like a part of me had been ripped away. I looked out the window and watched as the sun sank lower on the horizon and disappeared altogether.

I sat there way too long and didn’t want to get shooed away by the nurses, so I gathered my things and walked across to the room to close the window. Resting on the windowsill was a single speckled feather, it was perfectly formed and utterly beautiful. I placed it in my bag and walked out that room, with nothing to remember Kimba by accept the feather pressed between the pages of my padfolio.

Walking home from the hospital I took a familiar route past the tree where I had first seen Kimba. The streetlamp glowed illuminating the spot where she had been standing and for just a second, I wished to see her standing there again. At that moment there was a light breeze, a shadow flowed through the night, and settled in the rafters of Kimba’s tree. I looked up to see familiar, bright, almond shaped eyes set in the pale face of a barn owl, and then I thought an impossible thought.