With her head hung low, Faye woke up in her rickety metal pvc pipe bed, creaking slowly as she arched up in the somber dark room. She planted her feet on the small rug with threads that had long begun unraveling and made her way to a dresser whose paint had almost all faded away, revealing the raw termite damaged wood. Faye gently washed her face using a handmade terra cotta-like bowl, she had crafted the week before from a little pool of mud. She rubbed her eyes and cupped the gray cold gray water with her hands, bringing it up to her face. Looking up, Faye’s eyes met their reflection in the cracked window. Faye pulled back her messy hair and tied it with a scrap piece of fabric cut from her old shirt. Her attire consisted of a long distressed tshirt passed down from her previous roommate, aged olive green cargos, and a pair of worn combat boots she had found dumped in the garbage in an alley a few blocks away from the old abandoned mine factory. A shrilling voice called from the floors below, and Faye hustled down 4 flights down the creaking wooden stairs. As the orphans gathered in the dining hall, Ms. Pickrell's discordant voice called for the children to be lined up in order to give out breakfast- a measly amount of stale sourdough bread. The orphans teethed on the bread like squirrels, gnawing and picking out the edible parts for that it would be the only thing they had to sustain themselves for the day. In white clothes that had now turned gray, they shriveled together on the metal bench, their rack of lamb ribs poking through the fabric that barely shielded them. Their bare feet raw and blackened from the lack of shoes they could not afford, pitter pattered across the cold linoleum floor and back up into their rooms.

The grandfather clock struck 8 in the morning, resonating up the 4 flights into Faye’s room where she stared out the window ledge of the fire escape into the dark early morning hours. In fact, it wasn't just the morning that remained dark. Day and night, the sky remained a somber color, uninhabited by stars of the light of the moon. The world was cold and bleak, as it had remained for decades before the 15 years she had existed on Earth. From a young age, she had heard stories about the once blue sky and clouds from the mentally unstable on the streets. Amazed by the thought, she crouched down on the steps of the orphanage everyday just to hear Old Man Abner tell her the same story everyday. “When I was a young boy” he would begin and then go on to tell the illustrious adventures he would have with the sun shining bright upon him and the clear blue sky above. Faye would ask Ms. Pickerell, the other older children, and all of the adults she knew about the story of sky, but all of them had the same response, “Dumb girl”, they said, “Don’t you know that the crazy on the streets is telling you myths? The old man is lying through his teeth!”. Nevertheless, up until 9years of age, Faye constantly nagged about the bright sky, hoping to get a different answer each time. Every time, she hopped down the steps to hear Old Abner’s story, the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Botskin would groan as she swept her doorstep, often muttering under her breath, “Why don’t I just put thorns in my ears and it’ll be the same as that godforsaken story.” Every time, Faye tapped the shoulder of the older children, they would brush her hand away and say, “Faye, go away. Can’t you just be a normal kid just for once?”.  Every time, she would pull on Ms. Pickerell’s pencil skirt, her discordant voice would shout, “You annoying young girl! I already know what you’re going to say!” and then a series of threats to punish her if she wouldn’t leave at once. And without speaking a word, even when all she wanted to know was when dinner would be ready, Faye sunk her head down and walked away dragging her feet. Unfortunately, never got that answer she wanted here and the darkened world fell into tradition. When Faye finally turned 10, she promised that she would have to give up her quest and spend her time doing more productive things. By 15, Faye's mind was unable to grasp the possibility and plausibility of a clear horizon anymore. Darkness laid on the world, and forever the darkness will stay. She had accepted that the stories were never true, and it was just another thing Old Man Abner had made up to keep a young orphan girl entertained. However, even though she knew it didn't exist, it was something fun to imagine and she enjoyed painting what she thought that utopia would look like on the walls of her room. Using paint she had money she had scrounged up from the streets, she decorated her bleak lifeless walls and filled them with joyous and vibrant colors, as if she were trying to fill a void in her soul. From the pink colored sunflowers to the grassy meadows beyond the bright blue lake, Faye spent all of her free time drawing a fictional world that would never be. Despite the Ms. Pickrell’s many punishments of back breaking chores for drawing on walls, Faye disobeyed her orders to wash away her fabricated happiness. 

In habit, Faye turned around to Ailani’s side of the room, only to find it empty of her presence, yet her bed sheets still smelled familiarly like her. Ailani had been kicked out of the orphans home weeks ago when she had turned the ripe age of 16, the age limit of the orphanage. All orphans had to be kicked out when they arrived at that fateful age if they were not adopted and were forced to roam the streets homeless. Unable to provide for herself in the year-round winter, Ailani did not last for longer than a week, and a fellow destitute had found her corpse withered behind a dumpster. 

Faye constantly worried if she too, were to have the same fate. Her birthday would be coming up in a few days and there was no sign that she would be able to escape, the people had stopped adoption once the world had gone bleak and everyone became penniless, unable to afford and care for the raising of children. The population declined as the number of deaths exponentially increased and the birth rate was nonexistent. Faye and her fellow orphans were all that were left of children in the world.