A baby’s crying woke me up at midnight. I craned my neck and listened to where it came from. I climbed down from my bed and walked outside while the world slept, only the street lamps lit. The crying came from a rubbish bin under the lamps. The cry pierced the silence of the night. I brought myself closer. The sound grew. There it was — a foundling left to die. I picked the baby up with a sigh. "An exceptionally sentient being,” someone called me later, but all I knew was to care, to nurse this baby back to life.
Mehreen Ahmed is a prize-winning novelist. Her novel The Pacifist was a Drunken Druid Editor's Choice and an Audible bestseller. Her short-story collection Gatherings is nominated for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.