If you would like to hear the song I paired with this click this link for the song on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/track/76C3EEgPh8bUmaXPlXsMGE

Candles by Jon Hopkins (no lyrics, although on YouTube it might contain lyrics, the lyrics mean nothing to me, I just like the lyricless one for this story) - Snowy

...

Dense oxygen passes in and out from young, old lips, never once tickling the throat. Wrinkled, parched skin pinched and folded in places rose and fell gently to the rythm of the dead breath. People gathered and touched her pale cheeks and depleted nostrils. They cried and sobbed when they never did care before when she was suffering. They said "how sad, how sad, how horrid." They said she is "so sad, so sad." 

It wasn't exactly such a sad thing, as it seemed it was. In fact, the girl was smiling. The girl was dreaming, dreaming of the paper dove in the sky. She was dreaming, dreaming of a story blissfully actualized. 

"When everything seems lost, look for the paper dove in the sky."

It started in an alley, washed in a basin of liquefied anhedonia that bathed the homeless, enhancing the calamity from which they suffered. Skinny straggled humans combed the trash cans and hid in cavities of any kind, preparing for the frigid winter ahead. A girl ladled cold soup into fractured cups, passing the glasses to the fellow emaciated bodies.

The girl had hair like dirty straw, strewn and messy it dodged and ducked wherever it pleased. She had thin, dehydrated lips, whitened and dusty they cracked like they were painted over with thin glass and gradually shattered.

Withered and bony, the girl mangled the soup froth in her fingers and sucked off the fatty foam that clung to her nails. Her lips curled into a childish, innocent smile. How a little light can multiply and glare a million times stronger on a poor soul.

The girl was not like the smoke man or the "sick" woman or the veteran or the old alcoholic or the whistling girl that sat homeless in the alley with her. She was sweeter, softer, kinder. She had loving grace petrified by the stale cold of death and solitude. She knew she would never improve her own life, she wasn't stupid, but she tried her best to improve the lives of everyone and everything around her.

The girl would draw funny faces on paper bags with markers that concerned passersby handed her. She'd stuff her tired, decomposing hands into the bags and make their rectangular bodies dance back and forth. The older homeless would laugh, clap, and cheer on the girl. This type of happy language wasn't one that the passersby understood. The passersby would stand and stare and shake their heads. "It's the drugs and alcohol singing," they'd say.

Sometimes, haggard cats would come to feed on the garbage of the fruitful ally. The girl would pull chicken cubes from crude soup cups and feed the tender chunks to the starving creatures. She would pat their heads and send them off with their bellies full. The notion was looked upon as stupidity, but rationally, ignored. The others were thankful for the child's small inklings of happiness, it made them happy to see her smile.

The tragic existence was painfully dragged. The passersby looked upon the jumbled appendages in the alley as the stereotypical homeless of the city. Prostitutes and lazy alcoholics and drug addicts. They looked upon with condescending sympathy but rarely dropped their protein shakes and Cliff bars to offer a foothold of kindness.

They didn't look past the foggy eyes into the emptiness. Or the scratchy voices to the hopelessness. They didn't bless the blind or remove the hands form the ears of the deaf. They came by like passing gossip in a crowd. They did not seem to realize the existence of the dismembered folk.

These folk's existence consisted of not dying, instinct, survival of the fittest.

These humans merely did not die - or live. There life was unquenched and unfulfilled. Their heads were pushed under the water with only the cheapest of oxygen tanks to slowly feed them air. So no one puts up a fuss when another finds some feeble way of lighting a candle in the deep blue sea.

...

At night, some retreated into boxes or plastic cubes displayed on the edges of alley like townhouses for dolls. Others tipped weathered hats over their eyes and propped themselves against the brick of the buildings. Some, nocturnal - so to speak - ventured out to find maybe some clothes that fit or some smoke to take them up and away. The girl however, despite the rain or clear or the offers "join me in my dollhouse", laid on her back and sang the stars a lullaby. All the while she dreamed of far away.

She would shape the words of her deceased mother in her mind, molding and forming, recalling. She would recall them and obey. She would recall them and search for the paper dove.

She imagined the dove sweeping down from the dark sky, dragging ribbons of sunlight from its appendages. It would uplift her and bring her to a better place hidden between the clouds. A place of cakes and cookies. A place with fat cats that loafed around on downy pillows. A place where she could feel her mother's warm embrace again.

...

Preparation for winter had begun yesterday. Food was stocked in a sacrificed cardboard box, blankets and money were gathered by the young from passersby. More boxes were dug up from the dumpsters to form warm places to sleep. The old man collected smoke and blew it in a jar to open and close in the cold.

It was a grueling process, a procession like cattle to slaughter. And all the while the girl would painfully dream of the paper dove that she willed to come. I wish I could say this figment of magic came for the girl, but that would be lying. But, despite what you might consider to be a pointless dream, it was a crystallized embodiment of hope encrusted within the girl, inspiring her to go forward in the tragic life she led.

The church bells of a winter wedding stretched out and grasped the hearts of the souls that grappled among dull handholds as they struggled to climb, climb between the clouds. The girl had a sudden emotion, an illusion in the sky, that came over her like the birth of a waterfall, spawned by the chimes of the bells, and as it came her knees undid themselves and she stood, her heels stamped on the ground with an unsuspected strength. Drop your old kettles, drop your smoke, look! Look!

The girl ran and ran like she was fighting the ropes that pulled her back. The screams, the calls, come back! Please, just come back! Followed her like dogs hunting an elk. She ran past the baker and his holiday peppermint sticks. Past the market and the girl holding the peach jars. Past the clothing shop and the window shoppers. Past the man that danced with a holiday tree. It's great! It's affordable! He lied to the girl as she charged past.

The heels of her small shoes bared through the bottoms and her bare feet hit the freezing concrete. The pain was nothing. The people shouting was nothing. The bells, the dove - the illusion was everything. Church bells, church bells, run, come on, now, RUN! A police, she's crazy, go get her! Chase her! Chase her! Too fast, no, she's too fast, go get her, that girl, she's let herself go, I always knew she was a crazy one! Crazy, crazy, girl, go get her! Get that stupid girl!

But grabs at her ankles did not slow her wake. Quite the sight, that homeless girl, that crazy girl, running, running. What is she running for? What did she see?

"What's she looking at?" Betty Ann, yes, stop on the walk and shade your eyes, look at her, what is she chasing? That white in the sky. That fleck, that sheet. That thing that only the girl can see.

"It's insane! It must be gone!" Belched the hunter, per lack of concern. He clung to his rifle from behind the wood work bench. Yes. Grab your gun, point it, shoot it, shoot it in the street, now, run, run back to Kentucky, back to the woods where you came from.

The florist grabs the gun and drops the bullets. Don't be crazy, she says, never be crazy, not like this. The hunter steps back, back into the pots of tulips as the illusion in the sky grows and grows. The girl opens her arms. Come, come, come take me away. The thing in the sky spins around her and lifts her up, more join her, the hunter is hiding behind the florist window, the hunter's gun is hiding in the tulips. The glass shatters, fractured by the perpetrator, small and blunt.

Spiritual radiance radiates as the embrace is closed between the paper dove and the girl. The pair move upward, upward between the clouds. The bodies have followed, watch, they watch, more paper doves, come down, more to collect the humans and carry them upward, upward. Collect the shamed bodies strewn, strewn about like clothing soft off the line in a windstorm. To the light, bring them up, up, up to the light. Lovely between the clouds, bring them halos and cloaks and let them dance away, away from the cruel shame. Burn, burn the eyes of the laborers and the employees who scowled at their suffering with the light of love.

...

The girl, she lay in the street, a hole in her chest, she dreamed that dream, that lovely dream.

...

No, she never did see the real paper dove. Only her eyes did. The hunter had pierced her life. Pierced that crazy girl's life. Pierced the illusion she had into a fragile nothingness. Pierced it away.

...

Candles lit and joined in a chorus among the darkness of the night at the ceremony of the death of a young girl. A man threw down his jar of smoke. He walks up on stage. He holds the microphone in confident hands.

"Today will be the beginning of the lesson for this city. It is time for this city to learn how to love again."