What Would Sue Do

On my walk home from work, I came across this little girl, maybe about ten years old, absolutely screaming her ever-loving head off. She was screaming because some man was dragging her into a car. She was fighting like crazy and what she was screaming was, "I don't like you, I don't like you, I hate you." The man was well dressed in a business suit, presumably just left the office. Sitting on the ramshackle stoop from whence the girl was wrangled was a woman, perhaps her mother, and another little girl. Poor; not well-dressed like the man. The woman was yelling for her to stop crying and to be quiet, and the man was wrestling her all the way across the street while she never let up her screaming.

The presence of the mother-figure, the little sister-figure, the nice suit of the man, and my own reluctance to deal with terrible possibilities, led me to conclude that this was the daughter of divorced parents who is being picked up for a week with Dad. And if this is the case, he was surely mortified because I was passing right through this little scene and he knew exactly what I was thinking.

I didn't think there was anything I could say or do, and it was most likely a tantrum-y kid, but man do I hate the spectacle of a little girl being forced into a car by a man. So I wrote down his plates and told the police. Really hope it's nothing. Still a little unsettled.