“You’ll be safe now,” she said, and hushed him as a mother does to her baby. New tears began to swell in his eyes. There is warmth here. A genuine kind of selfless love that he had never experienced before. This is humanity. Tears fell over his cheek in hot streams from his eyes, but this time they didn’t flow from pain. They sprung from a new place of hope.

He slept beneath the tarp as the foul rains poured. It covered everything, enrobing all surfaces. It was a byproduct of the eruption that broke the sky, and shattered the west.

He dreamt that his mother was with him, running her fingers through his hair. It came to him from a deep place. A rising sense of the love she held for him in those early days before memory really began. His tears cooled and began to dry against his skin. He heard her voice singing softly. “My sweet Darius.”

Then light began to break into the dream and his mother faded. He tried to hold onto the moment, yearning to make the dream last just one more second, but it was too late. The reeking smell had found its way to his nostrils and sparked his brain to fresh alertness.

Darius opened his eyes. Both of them were working again. His left arm was functioning as well. The little girl moved towards him from across the lean-to and held a plastic bottle of water out to him. He drank deeply, and sat up with a little less pain than he’d felt before. She offered him the scavenged remains of a bag of sour cream and onion chips.

He looked at the girl through misty eyes and smiled with all of the gratitude he could express. A lightness swelled in his heart as a spark of energy fired through his flesh. If he could just fight against death a little longer, maybe he could find contentment here like she had.

The sound of the acid rain continued to peck thinly at the tarp above them. He looked at the face of the girl. He saw her strength. Although she had a hard time looking at his bloated visage, she had become bold enough to try.

His voice rasped out of him, “I would have died. How do I thank you?”

She smiled and shook her head, “You don’t have to.”

“I’m sorry if I look scary to you.”

“Your face is scary, but you have the eyes of a good person. That’s why I helped,” she spoke plainly.

“I had a dream about my mother. She’s been dead since I was two.”

“Mine died when I was five. She taught me everything I know.”

“She taught you to help strangers?”

“No, but she did teach me that good people need help more than bad people,” she laughed.

He laughed back, and was struck with a wave of dizziness. He forgot what they were talking about. “I had a dream about my mother….” he repeated drowsily.

He began to feel faint and rested his head against the cold concrete wall. His eyes became heavy. Then he drifted off into sleep once more.

When he awoke, the hazy glow of daylight had found its way into the alley and through the open side of the tarp. A layer of slick scum rested on every surface, adding to the slow degradation of the city. The girl was gone, milky pools of acid had formed where her feet had fallen on her way out of the alley and off into the city. The remaining chips and water had been laid against the wall, where cloudy drips had begun to work their way into the tarp. Darius looked back out of the lean-to, realizing that the girl had no plans to return.

Selecting some plastic bags from the trash nearby, he wrapped his bare feet to protect them against the searing mess. Stopping a moment, he looked up at the vermilion sky as the clouds rolled in against the sun. He watched it, feeling a calm contentment. The colors blended and shifted into fuschia, and then to a dusty purple as the summer heat pressed its way into the streets and alleys.

Darius's pain was still very present to him. His body was still broken, but he was alive. He breathed a deep breath inward, feeling the remaining coolness of the damp morning air. The hanging stench held no sway in this moment. Instead, he felt the thrill of life drawing into him and rooting itself there. Against all odds, he had survived the night.

Darker clouds swept in across the sun, breaking open to shower the city below in something much closer to clean water.

The sky was now dark again. Darius looked down at the alleyway. The depths of sensation from his dreams resonated sharply within him. The endless silent fall of his father, the loving kindness of his mother, and he was somewhere in between.

After tightening the bags around his feet, Darius looked ahead and walked into the street.