The first time I see them is at the station. The man and the little girl. It’s an instant like a beat of wings. I’m old enough to remember birds.

I see them through the purple burst of flame of my cigarette lighter as the Number Six darts past us on our right, and I see her white skirts flap in the breeze.

She’s maybe four. Dark, like potter soil, and little white teeth, and wide black eyes. She holds his hand. His hand is pale.

His clothes you might think would make him homeless, but I’m homeless, so I know better. His back’s too straight. His face is too clean. Distant look in his gaze like he’s meant to wear glasses. Black hair pulled back neatly in a long whip-like ponytail.

I go from the girl’s gaze to his and he smiles at me. Me standing there with my cigarette between my teeth like a dumbfuck addict.

Then it explodes. The subway car, I mean. A bomb on the tracks.

There are a lot of those these days.

There's no poetry in this city. Just the steady drum line of the rain, and that gets old quick.

Small vial. Thin glass, barely cellophane, liquid flush against the surface like a crystallized cylinder of rusty scarlet and ribbons of four o’clock gold. Strains of violet. Trace particles of luminescent green.

It’s called dream, because that’s the thing missing. The dreams went away and this is what we’re left with: diluted ecstasy in a narrow syringe.

Gerd cuts it but he cuts it fair. Throws in some anxiety #4 and college stoner sex. Cloudy. Numbing aftertaste. When it reaches your brain your body starts to move on its own, hit the broken alley floor hard, convulse and shake and your lungs feel like they’re starting to fill up with sand and it isn’t fun, no, but it’s the closest thing since the dreams went away.

I’ve nearly drowned twice in this city. In the corner of a wet alleyway with my right sleeve rolled up to the elbow and blood trickling out from the black socket in my skin, turning the water pink all around me. I breathed it in and tasted something copper and thought of pennies under my tongue, and summers at Grandma’s, and hot green grass, and cousins.

Both times Gerd’s the one to drag me out before I’m under. I’m too good of a customer to die.

Whore on the corner, Virtue. Knew her when. She says I oughta quit.

Spend more time on the stuff than off it lately. City’s too much to handle straight. Especially these days, after the war. The war that swallowed me up, swallowed all of us up, and then there was nothing else.

Did we lose? We didn’t win. I guess that narrows it. And in reparations, the dreams went away, along with the sky, and how we saw things. We traded it all for skyscrapers and cigarettes and soap.

The next time I see them, we’re riding to 5th and Dominion together, and the little one stares up at me without expression. I’m sweating hard and seeing double ‘cause I took a hit just an hour before and it’s all getting harder to shake these days.

I stare back at her, and I keep on seeing Her, the woman, the one from before the dreams left. I ask the man her name.

‘Certainty.’

Certainty. The other was called Hope.

‘Quid pro quo,’ the man without his glasses reminds.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Luna.’

‘Short for Lughnasadh?’ he asks.

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m Mätr,’ he supplies. ‘Well met.’

The train only gets as far as 4th and Islington. The tracks to take us to the Life District are walled up, and no one knows how to get there anymore.

I can only talk about the city as far as I know it, which isn’t very much.

I want to say that before the dreams left the people were different, but for all I know, it was the people that scared them off. And then the war came. And then we had to get used to scars.

In my gut there’s a feeling that before the war, there was no such word as Compromise. No negotiation between what we’d like to happen and what was. We were young like that.

These days life is a series of compromises, and the city’s getting smaller. The rain’s getting colder. I’m getting sicker. Because I’ve run out of ways even to negotiate, except with the vial, and the endless gnawing between each tiny little window called respite.

One time begging quarters in downtown I see Virtue, the whore, the one I knew when. She asks me how my Grandma is, but I only hear the tone, so I think she’s asking how I’m doing. I tell her ‘dead.’

On the corner of 1st and Jester we look up in the morning haze and see the billboards burning out their lights, sun-faded and murky, flashing state warnings. I see my guy up there, the guy I met in the terminal.

Wanted. For murder.

Euthanasia, more like. Can’t see how anyone wouldn’t be grateful to kick it in a place like this.

‘You know him?’ asks Virtue.

‘Maybe someday.’

A bomb goes off up on Broxton and we lose our hearing for a while.

The third time I see them, they’re wearing gas masks and Mätr is forcing a rifle into my hands, and the police have got us surrounded.

I’m sick on three days’ withdrawal and the edges of everything seem wet and shiny and too real and Mätr is a voice by my ear going ‘everything’s going to turn up sunshine,’ and I don’t remember anything after that.