Twice Spared
He walks every crowd with a glass syringe, and nobody feels the needle. Unless death has already missed them twice. Then they see him, and they are his.
In 1976 the attendant at a village health centre, a man who could not read, gave children injections from a box of expired vials while the nurse was away. Four children died, and forty men put him in the canal. He has been on his round ever since. He stands only where a crowd gathers, and goes down it arm by arm with a glass syringe that nobody feels. Babies cry as he passes. Only a person who has twice escaped a death written in their stars can see him, and whoever sees him is dead by morning. He never touches a child. Fifty years on, the nurse who wrote the words on that box sees him again.
