You do not think about destiny when you are eight years old and standing knee-deep in the stench of a dump.
You think about weight.
How much a twisted strip of copper will fetch. How many crushed cans equal one loaf of bread. Whether the bottle in your sack is glass or plastic. Whether your grandmother’s cough will sound wetter tonight than it did last night. Whether the men who roam the dump after sunset will notice a small girl trying to leave with enough scraps to turn suffering into one more day of survival.
So when you slide your shoulder beneath the arm of the bleeding stranger and feel the full drag of his body lean against you, you do not think, This will change my life.
You think, He is too heavy.
The man smells wrong for the dump.
Even beneath the blood, dust, and rot, he carries a faint trace of something expensive and clean, some cologne or soap that has no business in Bordo de Xochiaca. His suit is ruined now, one sleeve torn, one knee streaked black with mud, but the fabric itself is fine. The watch on his wrist glints again, vulgar and helpless under the late yellow sun. Rich people, you have learned, are often easiest to recognize when they are broken. Their things remain expensive even when their bodies are not.
You hook his arm around your neck more securely and pull.
“Walk,” you whisper. “Please. I can’t carry you.”
He tries.
His boots drag first, then catch, then slide again on the slope of mixed trash and dirt. He winces when his bad arm bumps against his side. For one terrible second you think he will collapse completely and crush you both into the filth, but then he finds enough balance to stagger beside you.
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