Beads of sweat streaming down her face, but the smile is unmistakable. She finally elbowed her way through the huge crowd of equally desperate people. Like them, she had to push through aggressive sweaty arms and over rubble of houses and shops she had until two days ago visited or at least passed by like so many other days in her life. The earthquake had leveled her neighborhood, which is an hour's walk from here, where one of the food distribution centers was. She was lucky that there was one this close. True, in the past she would just take the bus and it would take her ten minutes to come here, where her youngest daughter went to school. She was now dead, but that's not the point here. The point is that she was happy to finally get a package. She could have saved herself half an hour, but that's nothing to save in a world where life had stopped, almost. She didn't want to pay the looters for something she could get from the Red Cross, just an extra half an hour of walking through air still thick with stink of death and now often there's violence over the little food and resources trickled in from the outside. Yes, she is truly lucky to have to walk only an hour when many didn't have anywhere to go to, and many still are trapped and dying under heaps of their own broken homes and businesses.
Her eyes are large, the white of which against her dark brown skin of the face exuded so much hope that you would not think about all the tragedies around her and in her life. She was clutching tightly on her brown box. She knew that there were people who would kill her for it, despite the increasing presence of the police that finally came to bring some order to this chaos. Her big, dark red lips were quivering with joy. Inside the box was not only dry food but also a basic first aid kit for her two remaining children whose injuries weren't serious enough to be treated by the few doctors here that had to attend to life-threatening cases that often ended in death. Her husband was out fetching water and fixing up the makeshift tent he had erected for them in the backyard of what used to be their house. It was a miracle that the entire family didn't meet the same fate as her daughter.
But she wasn't thinking about her daughter then. It was another hour of walk through another throng of desperate, hungry, angry, people still wearing the smell of death. Outside a lot of buildings there were still some corpses left in the open, waiting for the limited number of police officers to get them. Now that the Americans have come to help bring order, the bodies have been disappearing, scraped up in bulldozers and dumped into dump truck before being hauled to the incendiary. The stink still gets to her, but her eyes were still sparkly holding that box, that precious box. That box didn't have the future. She had no idea what they would do the next day. She came from a middle-class family. Her husband was a merchant with ties to Florida, and she was a professor at the university in this impoverish city. They had a very nice house, envy of her relatives who were still living either outside in the villages or in little apartments in a different part of the city. But now their lives have been leveled to the same playing field, with some lives lost and many others injured and all very desperate and afraid. She and her husband had grown up having to struggle for survival in a country that seems always to be in a perpetual state of violence and uncertainty. Nevertheless, this current state of collective shock had unnerved her in ways she had never experienced, and clutching this brown box she felt for the first time joy that could only be born from misery. Her legs were tired. Before trekking to the aid center, she had walked the entire day since dawn looking for basic food, careful not to get dragged into armed conflicts among looters and between them and the police, careful to avoid the hospitals and medical centers where the stink of death is strongest and its intensity was matched only by the raw emotion from the living. She, furthermore, did not want to have to deal with her own emotion still bubbling from that moment when they told her her daughter could not be saved from the mortal wound on her little skull.
The wind from the sea was blowing strong now, and with it the briny smell of the calm waters soothes her a little, and its soft caresses on her skin stopped further condensing of the sweaty beads on her face. She was almost home, but she had to sit a little. She was very tired from this morning's foraging. But she clutched on her box ever so tightly. She rested her head on it, but was very alert to the people around her, some of whom she was aware were eyeing her box. But they also saw the machete on her side, and they wouldn't want their blood on its rusty surface. She used it to chop sugarcane she would buy from the local market, which was also completely flattened, with two of her friends perished under its roof. Now the instrument that helped give her family so much sweetness was her protection from now on. This morning, before it became her hunting companion, she was stopped by two men. She couldn't forget their eyes. They reminded her of the eyes of strayed dogs you find all of the city, and at dawn their eyes seemed almost glow with the desperation and violence of the hunger in their bosom. She had managed to steal a small bag of rice and a box of salt from a shop whose owner had left a long trail of blood before his corpse was taken away by the Red Cross under a huge slab of concrete. By the time she had gotten there most of the store's supplies had been looted, and it was only careful inspection and desperate search under every corner that she found the precious bag and box. She was ecstatic, more than today, but that ecstasy was short-lived because when she turned the corner those two pairs of eyes met her, one holding a steel pipe and the other a meat-cutter. Her motherly instinct told her to fight, but she managed to calm herself enough to think clearly. It was better to go try harder finding something somewhere else than meeting near certain death, which would turn things many folds harder for her family still grieving for the loss of her daughter. She pleaded, but the eyes didn't respond, didn't even scream out violence, they simply moved closer and became more menacing. She dropped the rice and salt and turned around, her eyes flooded with tears. She knew those two young men, whose faces were covered still with dust, whose arms were shaking, but whose eyes were filled with determination towards her meager food supply. Those eyes were once determined to change the world, or at least their world. They were her students, first year, full of joy, hope, and if she remembered correctly, love as they were handsome young men very popular with girls and yet very serious about their studies. But now they were hungry beyond description, and maybe they had lost family members too. She was very hurt to see this, more for the reason of this tragic consequence than for the lost of the food.
But soon she snapped herself out of the sentimentality of the stories of this earthquake, of which there are as many as the city's population. She was determined not to allow herself to become a victim again, to let her family be a victim again. And that's how she turned her cane snapping machete into a weapon. She had killed animals before, for food, and so killing a man for defense could not be much harder. And now she had rested enough, she stood up and with her brown box she trudged through the avenue she had known so well most of her adult life back home.
