Rain. Always rain.
It hammered the alley and pooled around me like the city trying to wash me out. I lay on the pavement, ribs burning each time I breathed. Thugs had come earlier — quick hands, blunt boots, faces that knew how to take. They took what I'd begged and left me where gutter met stone. That's why I was down there: hoodie torn, wet, tasting iron.
"So unfair," I whispered. "I want to die."
No one heard. No one ever did.
When the pain told me to move, I pushed myself up. Every step hurt like falling. I limped toward the main road, where streetlamps turned the night warm and loud. People flowed past under umbrellas, dry coats clipping like knives. They glanced at me like you glance at something filthy. One woman crossed the street.
"Ugh, smells like the gutter," someone muttered.
They were reacting to the dirt and the stench of the alley clinging to me, not the blood hidden beneath my hoodie. I pulled the hood lower and kept walking.
Their world was a clean cut from mine — collars crisp, cuffs unfrayed, shoes that had never met mud. My hoodie hung threadbare; water sat in the holes of my shoes.
When someone straightens a coat here, they don't think of the night spent with cardboard under their back.
When a hand smooths a dress, they don't remember the ache of an empty belly.
The sheltered forget the storm. The full forget the hunger.
I passed a streetlamp and saw her — an old woman crouched against a wall, a paper cup in front of her, her voice thin and trembling.
"Please… spare some change. I'm starving."
People stepped around her like she was a stain they didn't want to step on.
My fingers went to my pocket. Two coins — that was all I had left after the thugs took the rest. I checked to make sure they were still there, and as I pulled my hand free, one coin slipped out and hit the wet ground with a dull clink.
The sound was swallowed by the noise of cars, but the woman noticed the movement. Her eyes followed the coin as it stopped near my foot.
I bent to pick it up, but her weak voice reached me.
"Please, young man… have pity. Give me the money."
I froze for half a breath, then looked at her — really looked. The wrinkles in her skin looked like years carved by hunger. I sighed, picked up my coin, and slipped it back into my pocket.
"No," I said quietly, and turned to leave.
I told myself I couldn't afford mercy. Two coins wouldn't buy a real meal. Losing one wouldn't kill me, but I didn't want to let go. The thugs had already stolen the little I earned by begging — losing even one more felt like another punch to the gut.
But as I walked, her voice stuck to me — that small, fragile sound.
And her face, that hollow kind of desperation, followed me deeper than I expected.
Who am I to feel pity? I thought.
I'm just like her. Maybe worse.
A beggar. A nobody. The kind of face people avoid.
A child abandoned by a drunk father and buried mother.
A runaway sleeping in an abandoned truck.
A human ghost the world forgot.
I stopped walking. The rain hissed on the pavement. My hand found the coin in my pocket again — cold, small, useless. I turned back.
She was still there, still begging. When I approached, her tired eyes lifted in confusion.
I crouched down and pressed one of the coins into her wrinkled hand.
"Here," I muttered.
For a second she just stared — eyes wide, mouth trembling — as if she couldn't believe it. Her gaze flicked between my soaked hoodie and the coin in her palm. She knew I needed it as much as she did.
"Thank you," she whispered.
I said nothing and walked away.
Do I regret it? No.
I gave because it hurt less than keeping it.
I gave because I knew what it meant to be invisible.
Because the world had never stopped for me — but maybe, just once, I could stop for someone.
When I reached the truck I called home, I crawled inside and lay down on the cold metal floor. The rain tapped a steady rhythm above me. I closed my eyes and did what I always did — imagined a different life. Warm food. Real clothes. A hand that stayed.
A memory surfaced — my mother's laugh, a low sound from when I was small, and the smell of bread from better days. For a second the cold eased like a hand on my shoulder. She had said once, before the world got loud and mean, "A small kindness matters more than you think." The words came like a warmth in the dark.
It was the same dream I always used to force sleep.
The rain dulled to a steady whisper. The truck's metal roof dripped in slow taps. My breath grew shallow and the city noises faded into a soft hum. For a moment the world felt smaller — like a pocket of quiet held just for me.
In the half-light between waking and sleep, a shape stepped into the space of my mind. At first she was no more than a silhouette, then she took on the face I'd seen by the streetlamp — the old woman, but not weary now. Her eyes shone with a strange, cold light, and when she smiled it was like the sky opening.
"You gave me when everyone else turned away," she said, and the voice was the same brittle one, only deeper, the sound threaded with something older. "Because of that, I will return what you were denied."
She reached out and placed her hand on my forehead. I felt warmth spread out from under her palm — a slow, bright pressure like the sun pressing through clouds. It filled my chest, my bones. The rain, the truck, the cold — everything began to dissolve into that warmth.
"You will wake again," she whispered, close enough that her breath brushed my face. "Go. Live. Do not forget."
The light pulled at me, gentle but insistent, and I let it take me. The city fell away, the rain fell away, and there was only that hand and the echo of a voice.
That was how I slept my last sleep on Earth.