Prompts: 2 people viewed from above
I’ve no experience of proper first-aid; the last time I did anything like that, I was pretty much a kid myself and at a local village summer fete were pushed into the St John’s Ambulance tent by our parents (who thought this would be “a good thing to learn”) where we found ourselves blowing enthusiastically — if a bit randomly — into a dummy’s mouth whilst humming the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive” as the meter for the chest compression. That and “don’t let them choke on their tongue” was about it.
So now, with two small kids collapsed on the floor of my classroom, it was me everyone was expecting to help out. I’ll do my best of course but why me? And how did we get here?
The last thing I remember was the sound of the explosion. I’d been teaching English at this exchange school in a small town outside Kyoto for about 3 months and to date nothing majorly out of the ordinary had come into my day. (The whole strangeness of Japan aside of course.) Until today. My ears were sounding like church bells. The windows had somehow, mercifully, not splintered into on us. But these two kids were depending on me.
