On the evening of August 16th, I ran around the city with such fiery abandon that I forgot it was my birthday. I was looking for anything; penicillin, Amoxil, Unasyn. I broke pharmacy windows and jumped through counters, with tears barely dry on my flushed cheeks. But it was no use. Everything was looted, like it had been a week ago and would be a month from now.

I walked back dejected, but alert, in hopes I might still find an ambulance along the way. I walked back to the empty warehouse where the little boy I’d found in the street lay sleeping, with a wound that kept crawling up his leg like a forest fire. I laid beside him and wept, and through the quiet sobbing I fell asleep myself.

“Mia… Mia…” he shook me awake. “Can I go to the bathroom?”

 I stood up on impulse, staring at the poor boy through a messy veil of hair and the beams of sunlight that filtered through the windows. We walked outside, him with a slight limp and me with a heavy heart that splintered at every step. I had decided already that I would stop looking today.

“Hey, what do you say we go to the baseball cage again today?” I said, playfully.

The boy turned around, and I could see his eyes flashing with excitement. The cage was his favorite place in the city, and, now that it was empty, his de-facto second home. The trip was short, but it took us some two hours in between me making silly faces through car windows and him stopping to ask me to loosen the tourniquet. 

And then, we were there. Palace of wonders and oasis of joy—Dick’s Sporting Goods. I mostly sat and watched him smack the ball around, but every once in a while I’d swing and miss for some comedic relief. Even to someone as illiterate in baseball as myself, it was obvious that he’d taken some sort of lessons, because his swings rattled the cage so loudly that I thought it might snap off the floor. He swung and he swung, and I handed him Gatorade and sandwiches between breaks. He occupied himself with shouting “home run!” after every hit, and I occupied myself in thinking whether it was right to let him live like this. 

When we walked back to the warehouse, everything seemed right somehow. The boy was jumping and laughing and rambling about Hot Wheels, but with every joke I sank further into despair. This ten-year-old held my heart hostage. That night, as he slept, I snuck out to look for something, anything. I smashed car windows and tried in vain to brute-force the password of the safe at Walgreens. And then I screamed. On my knees, I screamed to the moon who was quiet and the clouds that could not stop moving.

The next week we spent exploring every nook and cranny of the city. Me hoping to find some bottle of pills, and him finding all sorts of toys and plushies. Whenever he yelled for me to come, only to show me another dinosaur, a part of me boiled with rage. I wished he would stop taunting me. Why couldn’t he find a first-aid kit, for once? Why couldn’t he help me?

Every day, before the sun went down, we visited the cage again. But his swings were getting slower, and the cage didn’t rattle anymore, and I was running out of Gatorade and sandwiches. One day, as we headed back home at sunset, I saw him sway in the fading light and tumble to his knees on the highway. I shrieked and ran after him, holding him by the shoulders and shaking and screaming. I shouted at him to stay awake and to keep his eyes open and to look at me and to look at me. And then I noticed he was crying, not because he was hurt but because I was screaming at him. I held him tight in my arms and muffled my sobs.

I walked back with him on my shoulders, and the next morning it was just me again.