The middle distance absorbed her gaze. Her sleeves, her nerves, frayed. Moths had chewed holes in the coats of the children; the children had eaten nothing for days. Days had been given to a journey, to the mantra, ‘Things will be better when we get to the camp.’ 

Now, her five-lined brow, like sheet music without a note, knew hope was a hollow lie. To be hungry and afraid and uncertain and on the move was the second-worst state of being. Hungry, afraid, uncertain and stationary was worse by miles. 

‘Did you wash those hands,’ she said, clawing at the paws of the youngest, fussing at a tap. ‘Got to wash those hands every time here, okay? Every time. Or you’ll get sick, like her.’

She nodded towards the next tarp, the day-old home of a family nursing a preschooler through the vomiting bug that was pinballing its way through the camp. 

Her own youngest straw-haired child stood passive and slack as her mother worked the gaps between the child’s fingers with a cement-coloured flannel. 

‘Did you change that vest,’ the mother asked. ‘Gotta change damp vests or you’ll get sick.’

She was curt, she knew that, but child management was the only available task and had to be done with vigour. It was, she reminded herself, in the children’s interests that their mother maintained standards. If you slid into apathy, you accepted death’s call.

The child was silent, and had been since they arrived. The three of them – the father having stayed behind – filed down the line until they reached an unribboned tent. There they tied the piece of cloth collected at the gate around a pole ‒ their claim on nine square metres of shelter, open on one side to the brown dust and ceaseless flow of human anguish. 

‘When is food coming, Mom?’

The older child, listless now, spoke for her sibling, spoke for everyone in the camp. The mother changed tack, opting not to lie, not to say, ‘Soon, love, just wait another while.’ 

Instead: ‘I don’t know.’

Would it have been better to stay and spend their hope under a familiar roof? As she wondered, an unwelcome competitive instinct surged within her at the sight of more new arrivals. ‘They need to shut the camp,’ she exhaled in a whisper. ‘Place is full.’

How many could be fed here? How many could make it across the border when it reopened? Who would decide who stayed, who went, who ate, and how much? 

She could do nothing. And it killed her to seek help while wishing it were denied to others.

‘Come here to me,’ she barked at the eldest child. ‘Those socks need changing.’ 

*

Gary Finnegan’s fiction has appeared in Litro, The London Magazine, The Phare, Roi Fainéant and Flash Fiction Magazine. He is the winner of the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025 and received an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland in August 2025. He has an MA in creative writing from Maynooth University and is working on a novel.