The Spaces Between
She must have just fallen asleep after a long shift at the bar, no longer than five minutes before, when Mrunal felt the earth move a little. She came awake figuring someone was climbing into the upper bunk of her cot. They’d soon settle, whoever they were—she was too tired to wonder who it must be. When the shuffling in the bed didn’t ease even after several minutes, she pulled up her eye mask to come to a sense of what could be happening, and dropped her journal and pencil to the coarse floor of her makeshift volunteers’ dorm—made of compressed straw having three bunk beds laid out at right angles to one another in a space that could be covered in about three adult steps, diagonally—while rummaging for her phone to confirm the time: it was twenty past one in the night. It was after recovering her stationery from the ground that she saw the low-lit bulb hanging in the corner, just above her cot, betraying two human silhouettes on the fabric of the conical roof acr...