The fire crackled, casting a dull glow through the unlit room. A rectangle of light spread across the floor to meet it, breaking only to wrinkle over the unmoving form of a sleeping man. He awoke with a shiver, and stared for a while at the gently wavering pool of firelight. His mind was caught in a moment of blissful emptiness, with only the occasional thought of running water and shining slivers of fish. Yes... he'd been fishing with his friends to try and forget, what was it now? Stress? Yes, he'd been stressed at something.

Standing up suddenly, he pressed a wall switch and flooded the room with clear, artifical light. Seeming a little more at ease he sat back again and began absently moving files and documents around on the low coffee table at his knees, trying not to look at the pitch black squares that were the french windows. The files. He concentrated on those again, looking over the names of the different children with whom he worked in the local child care center, dealing with abuse trauma.

One of those children had been the cause of his day off to go fishing. He'd admitted the young blonde girl into his office with a smile and a gentle pat on the shoulder. She hadn't looked up at him, a reaction he had learned to detect in children who had suffered abuse. In fact he generally started profiling a child the moment he met them: from the way they knocked on his door, the way they clung to, or didn't cling to, the social worker they were leaving. Sometimes he might even make a sudden movement of the hand, or pick up a sharp object from his desk, to gauge just how violently a child might react; something his colleagues would have criticised endlessly had they known, but a technique he found helped him get to the heart of the child's problem that much faster.

This girl did nothing of the kind, however. Indeed she refused to look at him altogether, even when he had sat her at his desk and asked her name in a kind voice. He spoke to her for a full two minutes, posing unobtrusive and simple questions about her name, how old she was, whether she wanted something to eat or drink. All this produced no response. Growing incomprehensibly humiliated, he had picked up an empty mug and made as if to raise it to strike her. It was a foolish move, and he was cursing himself even as he did it, but something compelled him to provoke a reaction in this girl. Yet there was nothing. She continued to stare blankly at the desk before her, ignoring him and everything around her.

He grabbed her by the shoulders in desperation, and now she did stare at him, not in alarm but blazing anger, and he recoiled with a scream at her eyes, which seemed at that moment to flash into green, and fled from the room. He sat huddled in the staff room, jumping at shadows and twitching madly at the click the clock made every minute until his wife, who also worked in social care, had come into the room to find him broken down like this. What had happened was hazy, but he remembered a slow return to his senses after a few warm cups of tea and his wife's embrace. For some reason nobody had thought to call a doctor, so when he finally came around it was to hear his boss offering him a day off before the weekend to relax a little and shake off the stress. He nodded dumbly and soon was forced to explain some of what had happened.

He kept most of the truth to himself. Mistreating a child in that way would most certainly have cost him his job, if not had him packed off to prison, but he had to recount at least some of it, so he said had taken the child's shoulders and tried to get eye contact, then everything else was the truth. There was a slight pinching of lips at the mention of contact on such fragile cases, but nobody made an issue of it, and his wife promised to take care of the girl, who would likely be sitting in his office still.

Now he sat before the warm fire, the abject terror of the previous afternoon almost forgotten, when his eyes landed on the girl in question's file. He took it with curiosity, shaking off the nagging fear in his mind, and he began to flip through the pages. The first thing that struck him was that the child's eyes were most definitely not green, they were blue and framed by a hanging mop of dusky blonde hair. Indeed he could barely see anything sinister or hateful about the girl at all. What on earth had come over him then? Shame welled up inside him, a disgust at his lack of professionalism and self-control, as well as a sneaking fear that his nature was not altogether as good as he had suspected.

Further reading revealed an out of the ordinary string of severe abuse, suffered through her first three years with her original parents, to a series of fosters and carers who all, inexplicably, had subjected her to sordid and random violence. Records showed her near death on two occasions, once in the care of a previously respected nurse who had pumped her full of drugs and left her heaped in a washing cupboard, and once in the care of a foster family, the eldest brother of whom had beaten her mercilessly and left her in the street, before running away from home never to be found.

Sickened, he found it hard to read on through the twenty or so pages detailing her life's story. He flicked to the end of the report and scanned over her psychological report. There was surprisingly little. She refused to respond to any human stimuli save physical touch, and would only eat and drink out of sight. She also ran away with unusual regularity. As a scribbled footnote someone had added "More than a few foster families have sent her back saying she didn't get on with the children" then another person had underlined "the children" and "she", and changed them to "the children didn't get on with her", writing only "Seems more likely."

He put the file down quickly, his mind conjuring up row upon row of leering faces twisted with hatred until he could bear the horror no longer and thrust his foot into the fire in a spasm of nausea and the pain brought his mind back to reality. He was hugging the red and black burn mark when his wife came in through the front door. She stood for a moment in the hallway, where he could see only her back, and finally she placed her keys and handbag down and turned towards him. Her face was haggard and her hair out of place. "Oh, what have you done to your foot?" she croaked, but her heart was not in the almost comically uninterested cry.

"Never mind that. What's wrong with you?" he replied.

She walked forward into the sitting room, staring vacantly at the bright flames until finally she whispered "You know that girl? The one who you were working with on Thursday? I... I took over her session for today a... and I..." she trailed off and seemed to tremble. When he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder she spoke again, but her voice was cracked and hoarse, as if she was about to cry. "I tried to talk to her but for some reason she wouldn't respond. After a while I got so angry with her lack of cooperation that I.. slapped her as hard as I could." she spat out the last part as if it felt filthy in her mouth. "I can still see her head snapping away from me like that... then she turned back so... sl... slowly and brushed the hair out of her face and..." then she did burst into tears, emitting ragged sobs she crumpled into her husband's arms and clung to him. "Her eyes. Her bloody eyes. You should have seen them. Oh God!"

He shushed her soothingly, stroking her back and holding her, but he was barely aware of her weight and presence, staring blankly at the wall those eyes kept flashing at him, over and over. It was only when his wife's breathing had slowed to a quiet and regular hissing that he fancied he could see something out of the french windows. Yes, there, a pair of green orbs framed by a wickedly grinning face.