The Barrel

The last thing I was expecting to see last night was a gun barrel staring at me. After the wait for the metro and the transfer and the long walk home, I was only four houses away and ready to fall into bed. Then, a dark sedan pulled up beside me

"Hey, get over here,"

I turned and saw the passenger of the car, not three feet from me, pointing a gun at me. I remembered the shine of the piece, the darkness from inside the barrel and little else. Before I knew it, I was running and screaming. I sped off the sidewalk, jumped down into my neighbor's garden and veered behind a house. The car sped off, but I was worried that the car would see me if it came around the block. I went back up to the street and saw someone standing in front of my house (later, I discovered this was Teddy taking out the trash). Freaked about going home, I ran away from my house until I came across a dog walker who called the police.

This has all happened before; this will all happen again.

Ten years ago, during a winter in Chicago, a very similar thing happened to me. There were three guys in the car back then and they only flashed the piece instead of pointing it, but everything else was the same. They drove up behind me, they said "hey, get over here" while showing the gun and I took off running and screaming. Even the afterwards was the same- me standing panicked and out of breathe in front of a confused bystander followed by a half hour of filling out a useless police report.

"Why did you run?" people always ask, arguing it would probably be safer to hand over ones wallet. The answer is I don't know. When this has happened, there has been no thinking. Everything is completely automatic.