The bright moon's diadem shone palely in the sky, suspended among the stars like a blurry speck of a tear accidentally shed. Its glow was like the rows of bright concrete streetlights illuminating the cracked asphalt. Snow lay all around on the sidewalks. The occasional car could be heard passing. Somewhere in this reality, there was a place for an old building, demolished by hooligans. It was too dilapidated to even serve as a shelter for the homeless or drunks. Of the entire tenement house, three walls made of blankets and burnt wood, a brick fireplace, and a large section of the former wall, which had formed the fence and the southern wall of the structure, survived. The wall was so charred that it was impossible to tell what material it was made of. It was covered with chalk and spray paint. In front of the wall, where a single rafter and a section of the roof remained, a child sat on a box with a patchwork quilt nailed to it. A boy. He looked about ten years old, with curly black hair peeking out from beneath an old, knitted blue hat with a pompom. Wrapped in a scarf of a similar color and workmanship, his face was practically invisible. Only a pair of innocent, deep eyes peered out from the gap between the scarf and the hat. Anyone who spent a moment examining the child's eyes would have noticed a distinct purple tinge in their light green irises. This anomaly, however, added expression and aroused interest; the boy was no less handsome. The scarf was tied in a knot at the front, so that both ends reached down to his waist. He wore a suede jacket—so large that it looked like a coat. In several places, colorful patches of denim, corduroy, and some unidentifiable, rough material could be seen. The trousers—slightly worn, insulated, and made of waterproof material—were in a distinctly different condition from the rest of his clothing, as they were practically new and without a single patch. The shoes buried in the snow were impossible to see, but the prints left by his arrival would have suggested, to a trained observer, that they were children's boots. Both prints were different, the right one almost flat, but the sole line was quite distinct and typical. However, there was no observer, let alone a trained observer. The child stared at the wall for a long time, as if reading what was written on it. Instead, he was staring down at a broken picture frame. It depicted a couple in their wedding attire. It was neither scorched nor covered in snow. The frame looked freshly smashed.
"Tell me, why is it that sometimes people stop loving each other?" the boy asked.
The wind howled, and the child's scarf suddenly flew up and began to flutter. After a while everything calmed down.
"You're saying it's not like they're stopping loving each other? Then why did my parents stop loving themselves and me and leave?" The little boy raised his head and looked at the wall.
A strong gust knocked a piece of charred wood onto the already broken frame, the embers rolling up to the wall, leaving a black streak in the snow.
"How do they forget? How can you forget when you love?" the boy wondered.
His eyes met the white writing: I love Zosia. "People use that word so much," the child thought. The wall was full of similar scribbles. A multitude of hearts, arrows, names, each with its own story and its own pain or happiness. People's dreams and desires written in chalk on the burnt brick.
"But why do they forget, what happens to make them forget?"
Snow began to fall. A few flakes of white fluff began to dissolve on the still-warm shards of broken glass.
"Do they forget about God in the same way?"
The moon shone brighter, or perhaps it was an illusion caused by the power outage, which manifested itself in the fading lights of the streetlamps along the road.
"Mommy said there's no God, only a guardian angel, and sometimes he too, and sometimes God, but if you can, give money to the priest, because there's no other way. But I don't have any, because I'm angry, because Daddy and Mommy didn't want me, and I came from heaven because they didn't like me there."
The wind howled with redoubled force, bending one of the makeshift walls.
"Everyone has a God," the wall replied.
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