Like old things on the verge of decay, like memories about to fade.
Beneath a streetlamp, a small figure ran and ran, then fell. Her arm was scraped, and beads of blood seeped out, forming dark red pearls in the dim yellow light. It hurt. Her eyes reddened, her lips trembled, and she was about to cry.
She did not cry. Perhaps she had grown used to pain long ago.
She already knew that crying required an audience. Pain was unavoidable.
A boy passed by and held out his hand.
“Are you okay?”
That hand was as clean and warm as white paper, not yet having learned the distance and disgust of the world. She was just about to take it, wanting to say thank you, even if that was all she could say.
The boy's mother knocked his hand away.
“She has AIDS! Don't touch her!”
Her voice was shrill, like a blade scraping across glass, shattering into pieces along the empty street. The boy was dragged away. He did not even look back. That hand vanished into the crowd, as if it had never appeared.
She was alone beneath the streetlamp. A bead of blood slid from her fingertip and fell into a crack in the concrete, silent and unnoticed. No one cared.
Perhaps she was nothing more than a gust of wind, gone without a trace.
