The rain has been dripping through your apartment ceiling for so long that you no longer hear it as weather. It sounds like a clock now, one that measures hunger instead of time. Each drop hits the dented metal pot you placed beside Bruno’s mattress with a hollow ping, a cruel little reminder that everything in your life is patched, borrowed, or one bad day away from collapse.
Your son is burning up again.
At eight years old, Bruno should be outside scraping his knees and chasing other boys through the cracked courtyard behind the building, but instead he lies under a faded blanket, cheeks flushed with fever, breathing too fast. Every few minutes he shivers hard enough to shake the mattress springs, and each tremor cuts through you like wire. On the floor nearby, Elena sits cross-legged in a threadbare pink dress, brushing the tangles out of a doll with one arm missing, humming to herself in the sweet, distracted way children do when they haven’t yet learned how to count the size of a disaster.
You stand in the tiny kitchen and stare into an empty refrigerator.
Three days. That is how long it has been since there was anything real inside it besides a half bottle of mustard, stale baking soda, and the kind of hopelessness that seems to grow in cold white spaces. You have already sold your earrings, your grandmother’s watch, the winter coat you told yourself you could survive without, and the black heels you once wore to your cousin’s wedding back when you still believed there would be occasions in your life that required looking elegant. Bills have eaten everything. Rent has chewed through the rest.
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