New Arrivals

The New Arrivals awaited our arrival in the Airport lounge. They were too shy to look directly at the people holding up placards, but somehow, one new Arrival was able to observe that their name was not among those being greeted rather imporantly. Another new arrival looked up every now and then, and then looked away disappointed. The third new Arrival whined his disapproval of the delay in pickup. Flights were landing and departing and people of different colours were scaring the Arrivals by their fierce passion of the voyage gone or about to begin. The world was noisy today.

All too suddenly there was a loud shout, followed by screeches, which were followed by louder noises! Vroooom, badaainnn, daamm! It sounded something like that and the Lady New Arrival was shaken to tears. Her whole body trembled with the impact of her fear. New Arrival bedecked in American jeans, held her tight and comforted her with soothing sounds as her body was now wracked with nervous jitters. What was it? asked the third new Arrival. She thought it was a tyre burst outside of the airport. A terrorist attack, the fourth finally suggested, breaking her silence. The news spread like wildfire, there had been an attack on some new arrivals from Bosnia, thought to be illegal entrants into the flight which brought them here and there was a search party for those who could or should've been dead. Loud whispers haunted the air and pierced any hope of noiselessness, in a hush that follows an alarm. Attentively, the four new Arrivals watched the change on people's faces- from happy and noisy, from cheery to glum, anxious, fearful, alarmed, hurried and foreboding. The situation earlier to the Now situation- within a matter of seconds had transformed so totally, one wouldn't have believed that this was within the same timespace and spacetime. A trigger so bolting that it turned a happy bunch into a mad bunch of folks joined together in complete harmony of fear and the unknown. It's possible, and it was happening in a continuous flow- from one to another and so on and so forth.

We arrived bemused. We departed with the New Arrivals in haste, having been granted special favours from the Government. These New Arrivals were the special Task Force that their Government had had sent over. Most were dead, those unfortunate to have met with accidental deaths or such like. These New Arrivals were fortunate that we were late arrivals ourselves, much later than we had anticipated but early enough to allow them to breathe free air......at a price but live they did.