A voice cries out in the dark, pleading for someone, anyone, to help. Under a flickering streetlight outside the closed store, the voice whimpers. She turns toward the sound to find a young woman wrapped in tattered blankets, trying to keep warm. The young woman begs passer-bys on their way home from work to help. Most people, seeing her disheveled state, avoid her heap and walk quickly by, pretending not to have noticed her. The storekeeper, who can’t bring herself to get involved, also can’t bear to pull herself away from the window, and so continues to watch, hopeful that someone will provide the aid she is too selfish to supply.

Sympathy touches one man, and he turns with a small smile before handing a few coins to the woman. “Good luck,” he says before returning to walk home down the sidewalk. The woman looks at the clean, shiny coins in her bony, dirty hand. She is grateful, but knows that the few coins will not provide even a warm drink, a small meal or other relief.  So she continues to beg, unsuccessfully, as the rain begins to fall and the sidewalks clear. The woman is forced into a small overhang outside the closed store, and slips from the storekeeper’s view.

Soon, a friend joins the woman, standing in the shelter of the awning.  He is also homeless, but has fared better in collecting donations that day. He purchased some pills: benzos, he calls them.  Without saying a word, she exchanges her coins for the contents of a small brown bag hidden beneath his coat. The coins are not enough she knows, and she whispers, “God bless you,” as he disappears, melting into the foggy night.

The woman smiles sweetly, ready to forget her life. With frozen fingers, she removes the pills from the bag and swallows them with rainwater she gathered in her free hand.  She sighs as the feeling of calm and happiness clouds her mind, and she sits against the cold wall on the damp sidewalk, waiting for her mind to escape this world.

Images flicker in her mind, bright and full of life. She sees the handsome man who once beckoned her to come and join him for a simple meal. Lost in the dream, the woman’s mind rushes forward, to see him smiling in his tuxedo as he spins his new wife around the dance floor. She remembers how she took one small hand, and her husband the other, to swing her son beneath twinkling stars as he giggled with delight. The woman smiles and hums as her imagination fabricates a life with her erstwhile family, surrounded by love, music and laughter.

All that she remembers represents but a small hiccup in her reality. She had been raised in an orphanage, bounced from one foster home to another, never knowing how she ended up all alone when she was two years old. She never imagined knowing happiness, until she met the man of her dreams: her best friend and confidante. They met in a group home when they were 16, both abandoned by their families without explanation, but together they found strength and support.
They left the home together and forged a life. They married in a simple ceremony in the garden of a friend. They rented a small apartment and held steady jobs. They laughed together, and imagined a better life.  They promised to strive for all they imagined. When their imaginations soared, they pictured a small house, with children, a large yard with a big, drooling dog, and simple vacations to the lake. They imagined love, and stability and support for their family. They started their family, with a beautiful baby boy with sparkling eyes and a perfect smile. With the promise of a better job that would allow her to be home with her child, the small family packed-up their car and drove to California.

Their imaginations had soared far above their difficult past, and they rented a small apartment so they could save for a house. Her imagination had become her reality, until the call came.

She started to cry, as reality began to erode her memories. The rain had stopped falling, but the winds forced the damp air between her thin coverings, clawing at her skin. She shivered, as the truth gripped her soul like the winds gripped her flesh.
There had been a car accident, and her husband and son had died instantly. Would she like to come claim the bodies? Oh, if she couldn’t afford a burial, then she should let the state cremate the corpses. The bodies were pretty mutilated anyway.

She had frozen, in shock, and sat in the apartment until the power was disconnected, the water shutoff, and a sheriff sent to evict her. She had no car, no savings and no phone. She didn’t need a phone because she had no family to call, no in-laws, and no friends in her new city. She had no way to return to her former life. She had no safety net. Without a car or an apartment, she couldn’t find a job. Soon, she was unclean, in tattered clothes, a shell of the woman she had been a few weeks before.

She had let her imagination soar once, and her fantasies were the only thing that brought her peace. She dared not hope again, for she believe it was better to never have had than to have loved and lost. As she sank into a restless slumber, the sun began to rise.

When she unlocks her front door early the next day, the storekeeper finds a broken heap filed under the awning outside her shop. As a small burp of compassion swells in her throat, the shopkeeper brings the dirty young woman an old coat someone left in the shop last month, together with a cup of coffee and a day old muffin. She fancies herself a humanitarian, and praises herself for her kindness as she tells the woman to face reality and move on. The shopkeeper doesn’t want to contemplate that perhaps the drugs did not ruin the woman, but rather, she was ruined and so turned to drugs.

The homeless woman mumbles her thanks and shuffles away down the street, in broken shoes and damp feet. 

Once upon a time, her imagination had soared like a large, content hawk on the gentle breeze of a clear summer sky, only to be shot down by a bullet from the rifle of misfortune and reality. For her, the hawk would not soar again.