“He got sick because it’s so dirty in here and we don’t have any water,” José said to me one day. “We have to find someplace that does.”

“I doubt any place in the city has running water, José,” I said.

“Then maybe we have to get out of here.”

I thought of the world outside of the train station. I thought of having to look for someone that I wasn’t sure was alive anymore. Fuck, fuck that shit. I wasn’t leaving, not until I could deal with the fact that I might never find her.

We came to a compromise. We would leave the station during the day and look around for places that were more hospitable. Maybe places FEMA had set up in, or some do-gooders with good connections. If we didn’t find anything soon, José and Sebastian were out of there, whether I was coming with them or not.

We started out small, just circling a few blocks around the station. Then the circumference grew wider and wider. We were about twenty blocks to the south of our home on our first day out when we saw it.

At first, it didn’t seem like much. Just a little splash of bright green on a building. We were walking in that direction, anyway, and when we got closer, we saw it was an apple. It was bigger than real life, but other than that, it looked so real that I wanted to take a bite out of it. I stepped back to look at it, and I saw that there was another green-brown splash of color about fifteen feet away from the apple. I stepped toward it and saw that it was a pear, glowing up off the side of a ruined apartment building. And another fifteen feet from that was a kiwi fruit, with shining black seeds and a green so bright I could almost taste the tartness of it in my mouth.

Now, in full-on motherfucking wonder-mode, I stepped back to see another painting fifteen feet from the kiwi. It was a honeydew melon, shining pale green, with a slice cut out of it so you could see the darker seeds inside. It looked so real that I wanted to lick the wall. I followed the path that the fruit paintings had set up and saw a huge watermelon with just a hint of red peeking through the greens of the rind.