No one thinks they will end up like this. No little five-year-old boy or girl sits on the carpet of their kindergarten class during sharing time and says they want to be homeless when they grow up. Before Aria had become one of them, she had always looked at homeless people like they were “those people.” Now, she understood that a life on the streets was just a hair’s width away from almost anyone. Given the right cocktail of conditions, anyone could find themselves here. They were not a different species, even though it comforted people to think of them that way. To separate themselves from “those people” who were homeless made folks feel further away from being homeless themselves. But the truth is, “those people” were people just like you or me. They, the outcasts of mankind’s ambition; the carriers of the shadows that no one truly wants to face.

There was a pining in their movements. A boundless yearning for a kindness they had either tasted or never tasted. A deep hunger for love they might or might not ever find. Their lives were the hunger of the pine.

Aria walked toward the car lot, through the parts of town that served as a cocoon for those without a home. She felt a knot in her stomach when she got close enough to turn off onto the side street that would lead her there. At first she saw no movement and imagined that she would find herself standing before a deserted lot. But that was not what she found. They were living there, like a graft over the scar of the fire-damaged earth. With nowhere else to go, having been able to do nothing else, some of them had stayed there. EJ had not been seen since he had been taken away in the ambulance. Aston had been taken away by the state and Ciarra had been arrested. Taylor, who had moved in with Dan the night it happened, had not returned. But she could see Robert, Anthony, Darren and Wolf there, rebuilding their lives from nothing on the deflagrated landscape. Their tents and tarps had been turned into smoke. Only the frames of the broken-down cars remained; their windows gone, their colors turned to black. Darren, who usually marched through his disciplined daily routine as a replacement for the regimented life of the army, was passed out cold on the dirt under a tree. He had used the bottles of alcohol, which crowded him like debris from a shipwreck, as an anchor. He had tied his anxieties of having lost all of his things to the liquor and had sunk them deep into a drunken slumber.