One day in a sunny afternoon of October, a thirty-three-year-old man was walking with his 7 year-old boy along the river Stour near Straford St Mary, about 5 miles from Colchester in Suffolk. The boy used to drop pebbles into the river each time they did their walk. His father was on holidays while his mother was at work.
There was not a lot of people on the bank of the river because we were in the middle of the week and the temperature was not very high for it had just frozen the previous night. The wind was blowing from the east. It was an anticyclonic situation.
The father used to trust his son because this one was always very careful, it's the reason why the man had taken his still camera to take pictures of trees the leaves of which had turned to different colors from yellow to brown.
In a moment the boy probably threw a small stone more strongly than usual unless he was too near the river? The fact is that he slipped on the grass and fell down into the river. The boy shouted but it was too late, he was in the cold water and could not swim.
Suddenly, a sixty-year-old man who was jogging found himself near the place where the boy had fallen while the father was a little farther. Without asking himself any question, the man jumped into the cold fast flowing river. It was not very hard for him to save the boy for the current almost pushed him into his arms, so he had just to swim a little and after to the bank where the boy's father helped them to go out of the river.
The sixty-year-old man was a great sportman. He used to run one or two marathons a year. He is also an open-minded man upon the world and mankind. These are not the only reasons that made him jump into the river. It was obvious for him to do that because 35 years earlier his own five-year-old child was saved in similar circumstances by an unknown person while he was not able to do it himself for he had had an accident some days before and walked with crutches.
To save the boy at this moment was also a way of thanking the man who did the same thing a long time ago.
article © 2010 by Daniel Questel
This piece of creative writing was based on an exercise called "why would someone do such a thing". Daniel found an explanation for the scenario which he was given - but he went much further and wrote the above short story.