You’ve only known me for a day, how are you so good at reading my mind? Can you actually read minds in general?

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City
Current Date: May 13, 2024

Character: Dmitri Nizovtseva
Race: Human
Age: 32
Current residence: New York City Ruins, New York
 

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Children are strange. However, it’s possible that I feel this way about them because I was never around them. I was around other homeless young ones when I was younger, but they were my age. So, I certainly don’t consider that being around children because I was one of them.

I don’t know that strange is quite the proper word to use; their imagination, from what I’ve been seeing when I do walk on by what seems to be the daycare—a word I only learned in recent years—has no end. They seem to be able to play make-believe games with nothing more than what surrounds them and the world they create seems to be fit for kings.

I found myself watching them play, just a few days ago. I was walking by, fully intent on just trying to get something from the market and then get back to the apartment we call home, but I stopped by the daycare and just watched them.

Being able to tell what age someone is, isn’t something I’m good at, so, as it stands, I don’t know that I would be able to tell what age the children who were playing would have been. They could have been five or six, maybe even eight or nine. They spoke well enough but coming from someone who started to talk at a later age in life, it also stands to reason that I don’t know from what age that would be, that a child would speak cleanly the way these seemed to.

Whatever make-believe game they were playing, there were dragons, magicians and a lot of shiny things. Those were their words, shiny things. It made me smile a little. I wouldn’t really have had much better words for whatever it was they were imagining. There was a little boy who did look slightly younger than the others in the group and he was being kept somewhat apart, I’m not sure why. He was talking with his hands more than words but what few words he spoke made little to no sense to me.

He was talking about mind reading, about how his parents had just recently brought him into the hub and that he didn’t know how the other was managing all that. At least, that’s what I’m making of what few words I could understand of his speech and the other child he was speaking to didn’t seem to be able to make much more sense of whatever it was he was saying.

I admit that my attention was more on the make-believe story the others were playing but as someone who took too long, or so it feels like, to start talking, I guess that I was curious as to the way the younger boy was forming his words.

In a way, I think he reminded me of an older woman whose path I had crossed only a handful of times before Rein came into my life. It was only on the last meeting I ever had with her that I learned of her disability, but it hadn’t seemed to really slow her down. It hadn’t stopped her from interacting with others and I envied her that freedom, in some way. It got her in trouble a few times that I saw from a distance but still.

I don’t fully understand what deafness really means; I mean, I know that the word means that there is a loss of hearing. That sound isn’t fully present, if present at all, in the person who is deaf, but I don’t know how that feels and I don’t know that I really want to know either. The young boy’s hand motions and the way he spoke some of his words reminded me of the older woman and it makes me wonder if he isn’t deaf, or maybe partially so.

Not that I’m about to go out of my way to find him and ask him these questions, I barely talk to anyone other than Rein most days and the few people I work with, I’m not about to start opening up to more people out of simple curiosity. As it stands, the boy might not even really realize what is happening, if that’s even what it really is. For all I know, he grew up with foreign parents—or parents who spoke a language other than the main language spoken here—and his knowledge of English might just be limited.

There are plenty of options to be had as far as whatever reason he had to speak the way he did, and it is none of my business, in the long run. All of this because I was drawn to children playing make-believe. My mind is a strange place.

Final Word Count: 795

I will sleep when I can’t stand any longer, which may actually be sooner than I think.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City
Characters: Dmitri Nizovtseva
Race: Human
Age: 29
Current residence: New York City Ruins, New York
Final Word Count: 746 words
 

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If there is one thing that I suppose might work against me, is that I have a hard time knowing when to stop. Now, I’m not saying that I wouldn’t know to stop if someone told me to, that’s not quite it.

I’m not sure how to put it into words. It’s mostly when it comes to focusing on something I’m doing, like work. Collecting, cleaning something, gathering. I’m not exactly good with hunting so I haven’t really tried that and that’s probably for the best but I’m stupidly good at gathering things and I’m pretty good with climbing so that turned out to be one of the things I don’t mind helping with, it makes me feel useful.

I didn’t have a job before; when you live your whole life on the streets and you don’t even have paperwork to your name—the name I have is the name I just remember from my childhood—it’s pretty hard, near impossible, to have a job. So to be able to actually help out there, once the snow had started melting, it was a bit life-changing, for me.

The thing is, yeah, when I start, I usually don’t think to stop. I mean, the hours will go by, I’ll work hard, I feel like I’ll be pulling my weight and then, just like that, I’ll be focused just so much on what I’m doing that I don’t see the need to stop. I’m the type of person who would probably just keep on working until I couldn’t keep to my feet anymore.

Which, you know, at times, it happens sooner than not and just the once, I was so focused on getting the work done, more than on my wellbeing, that by the time I’d come back down from the tree I climbed, I ended up pretty much swaying where I was standing and I had to sit down, I was so exhausted from the constant climbing up and down the trees. I hadn’t felt that exhaustion get to me, but it eventually did.

At times, I wish I could, I don’t know, sort of be part robot? That way, I wouldn’t have to worry about my body not being able to keep up with me. I know it might sound strange, and I know I might get odd looks, in a way, but I just want to make up for the years I couldn’t work, in a way. I can’t be the only one who thinks this way but even if I am, it’s fine.

It’s not because the world isn’t the way it used to be that people no longer have to do their parts.

Mind you, it’s not because I want to work as hard as I can manage that I don’t know how to not work when I’m not expected to. On the days when I’m not scheduled, if you would, I tend to not go much of anywhere. I stay with Rein, and I tend to let her decide what we’ll do with our days. Most of the time, it’s just quiet and peaceful, we might roam a little, but it’s been comforting to have a place to come home to and call my own.

I mean, just before the snow, there was a little room that we both used that I did call home. It was warm, it was inside, and it was safe from most things but once the snow started falling more than I’d seen it fall before? I didn’t go back there. That, in itself, turned out to be a good thing; we would have been buried alive, otherwise, and I don’t know that we would have managed to get out of it.

For one thing, it was partially underground and the door leading out would have been buried under countless feet of snow, and the door leading to the upper floors was locked. It was why I knew that the place had been safe; at least, it had been safe before the snow, after the snow, well clearly not.

I’m still not really sure how we’ve survived it all. I knew that we’d found a spot in a building that had mostly been abandoned and I’d managed to get us blankets and coats to handle at least most of the normal winter by then, but I’m still not really completely sure how we survived it, in the end. Not that it matters, I’m just glad we’re here, now.

You’re being too nice to someone like me.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City
Characters: Dmitri Nizovtseva
Race: Human
Age: 29
Final Word Count: 722 words
 

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There had been a young woman in my life, I think I had been thirteen at the time. I still remember the smell of her perfume or the way her eyes would sort of grow really wide whenever she found me still settled at the same spot day in and day out. I’d found that spot fair and square, it was part of a tiny sort of community of other people who also had nowhere else to call their own.

Almost every day, she would stop by me and give me a little something. At times, it was a pair of gloves, at another, it was a head covering thing. It was late autumn then, I had no need for these things just yet but you can bet that I put them away in my things and that was that. I wasn’t going to waste that generosity.

A week or so in, though, as she dropped a fresh and still warm sandwich from a shop not far, into my hands, I had to ask her why she was doing that. I told her that she was being too nice to someone like me. By that point, I’d already ‘learned’ that you didn’t play nice with the people on the street. In the eyes of most everyone else out there, you were trash and not worthy of a second glance.

I remember how soft her eyes went at that question. Most of her answer is muddled now, it’s been so long, but I remember her telling me something about how I reminded her of her son. How he’d run away from home. Is that what she thought I was? I wasn’t. All I remembered, even back then, were the streets. I think I was born out here—out there.

If given a chance, I think she possibly could have wanted to try and bring me back to her home. Maybe, if she couldn’t save her son, she could potentially save someone else? Looking back now, it felt like that a bit but halfway into that second week of her giving me these little things, the cops had come and dismantled the small community. I never saw her again, nor did I ever truly see again anyone else that had been living near me.

Man, I missed that spot, it had been just right. I’d been around a bend that didn’t get much wind, the alleyway itself was weirdly covered and I was also free from the rain. There had been the sandwich shop not far and more often than not, they threw away such perfectly good food that it made me wonder if they didn’t do it on purpose considering how often I was back there. I’ll never know.

I wish I could have thanked that woman. I wish I could have told her how grateful I was that she took a little bit of her time to give me these things even though I felt as though I didn’t deserve any of it. I can look back now and tell myself that it was clear she most likely was trying to make amends. She might have been going about it in the wrong way but if helping another kid down on his luck was what helped her feel better, I don’t see why it was a bad thing.

Some might have gotten greedy from the little things she brought in but I was just always so grateful. The winter that followed the week and a half or so of gifts was the warmest I’d been in a while. New gloves, new hat, new scarf, she’d even somehow gotten me new shoes. They weren’t winter boots but they were shoes that were whole and kept my feet warmer than they’d been in a long while. Of course, I outgrew them pretty quickly but I still had been warm during that particular winter.

For how short our time together was, I still remember it fondly enough. I wish it hadn’t ended with the cops taking it all apart but I don’t think the two were related, not really. I mean, it’s possible that someone saw her there every day, giving this street kid something on a daily basis and they called it in but I think it was just bad luck, in the end.

We have the game.

 
Timeline/World: New York City – Surviving Earth
Characters: Dmitri Nizovtseva
Race: Human
Age: 27
Final Word Count: 670 words
 

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I grew up on the streets. That’s more or less what I remember of my life before. It’s all I have of my childhood. Don’t ask to know how young I was when it happened, I don’t remember. Does that mean I’m illiterate? I am, what does it change to the world now? The world has little to no need for words on paper or screen, does it? I used to be able to get what I needed just fine before; it’s not much different now.

Of course, her presence helped, once we were used to one another, but that’s something else entirely. I don’t want her out of my life, that would break me in ways I can’t even begin to explain but I wish she hadn’t gone through all she did to end up at my side.

I remember. I think it was three or four years before the big snow but it was a day with snow. Not quite the first but not the last, just a layer on the ground and the weather outside cold enough to make me dig through my things to bring out the heavier coat I’d found just that year before. I was glad to have that much, I still remember the year before and how much I’d struggled through the cold.

There was this frenzy around a certain shop with video games of all sorts at the time. Not that I knew they were video games, not really. I just knew they were moving images on a screen and that a lot of kids flocked around that particular shop, always with bright-eyed hope. Some would come out with a bag but most didn’t. I don’t know how expensive that game was—money I did understand to a point but I had a hard time understanding why people bought unnecessary things—but I figured it had to be pretty expensive for how few kids would buy it.

Every time one of them would come out of the shop with their little bag, they’d be talking excitedly together, going on and on about how they had the game and they’d spend all of their time playing it because it was awesome.

It made me wonder about what type of things you found in games that could eat up hours of your time. I guess my routine and theirs really was so very different because I still couldn’t understand how hours could be wasted on frivolous things. Then again, I suppose it mostly might have been for the fact that I still hadn’t really found a place where I could huddle during the colder nights, a place I could call ‘mine’ for what it had been worth. The last place I’d had, had been taken apart by the cops. It hadn’t been as though we were misbehaving or causing trouble. We didn’t harass people who went by, we didn’t beg for their food or money. It was a small little not-quite community and we kept one another warm.

Everyone scattered after that one day and I’d been looking since. There was a little nook in the alleyway not far from that particular shop that wasn’t so bad, that’s why I spent enough time near that place to see so many come and go.

Did I envy them? I don’t really know. I was so focused on trying to stay warm and on finding food that I didn’t give them much thought, beyond the fact that they were spending money that could have been put to so much better use.

All in all, I can’t say I had a really terrible life for the most part. I mean, sure, I spent it on the streets, I spent it scavenging for food and clothing and anything that helped with keeping me alive but, all in all, I’m alive now. I’ve survived through a world-ending snow. I no longer have to worry about food or comfort at night or wonderful company, so why complain?

I’ve never once been to one of these events. What am I supposed to do?

Timeline/World: New York City – Surviving Earth
Characters: Dmitri Nizovtseva
Race: Human
Age: 25
Final Word Count: 587 words

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He didn’t miss his time on the streets. He didn’t miss the struggle of having to survive with little to no food or trying to play ‘follow the leader’ while stealing something that he would get near to no part in.

Dmitri still remembers the first time he came to be part of these ‘games’ as they were called. He’d been young, younger than one should perhaps have been while on the street but that was something he didn’t discuss much. He’d gone hungry for a few days until someone had found him, given him some food, a blanket, a roof over his head, so to speak.

He could keep that particular roof over his head so long as he behaved. So long as he didn’t act out and ‘paid’ his stay by doing what was asked of him. A few times a week, there would be a gathering of all those who lived within the abandoned warehouse, a building that had seen better days, and they would be given tasks. At first, these tasks were foreign to him, he couldn’t understand them or grasp their point but he did what he could. He liked having a little nook to call his own, a place to settle down to sleep, even if it was hard and cold.

He didn’t stay in the warehouse very long. The tasks kept on getting more and more demanding and they were things he just didn’t want to do, things that felt wrong for him to do. The crazy gleam in the eyes of some of the others was not helpful either, of course. That had been while still back in Russia, while keeping away from his father, from the Russian mob and the rest. He still could remember sneaking his way onto the plane when he’d been a young teenager, landing in a so very foreign land and just finding means of surviving.

Most of the time, this meant pick-pocketing, something he’d mastered more than easily enough. Other times, it became a matter of giving someone the puppy eyes, which tended to work just as well. It didn’t keep him living in a place where he had all he needed but he still had a place in a mostly unused spot at the back of a well-kept building. He had some heat, he had two couches, water given to him by the sweet little old lady just one door over if he batted his lashes and baby-blue eyes at her and he had means of getting some food.

Meeting her hadn’t changed his routine much. It had actually simplified it. At least until the snow came the following year. That turned out to be a terrifying event but, his by then little home that they’d had to abandon to avoid being completely snowed in, had been just a few streets away from the place he had managed to get them picked up by the military so they could be brought to the underground thing where survivors were brought to stay.

It had been a struggle to settle down his habit, not reach into the pockets of bypassers to take what they might have. Then again, no one had had much of value in their pockets at that point and food was given to them freely, so he had adapted well enough. They lived now, almost better than before but it was a different kind of living, one he had adapted to well enough, or so he told himself.