Strange how sometimes things happen in life for some reason. Call it fate or destiny or whatever you will. I simply deemed it the misfortunes of life. And I had a lot of misfortunes in my twenty one years here.

I had no job, but who did these days? I had no family. I had no strength to turn what I was forced into around. I was living in the tiny alley way back behind the Chinese restaurant with nothing more than the ragged clothes on my back. The food came from the grimy metal dumpster at the end of the day. My water fell from the sky. And bed was a stack of old newspapers thrown to the curb in the same manner I was.

So what that little boy saw in me, I knew not. To the whole world, myself included, I was a weak fool, but in his shining eyes I was powerful, fearless, and the wise. I was something beyond my destiny, beyond my fate, beyond my misfortunes.

The boy came to me on a snowy day in December. He was only four then, but looked at the world with a different view than everyone else during this time. There was no thing as money, no such thing as homeless, nothing about the economic crisis. And it was a breath of fresh air. I remember how he’d lost his scarf in the wind. I remember the smell of ginger as it hit my face. But, above all, I remember how he c***ed his head like a puppy when he found me there under the papers.

Every day after that I saw that boy standing at the opening to the alley at the same time. I grew used to smelling the ginger before noon. It soon became a yearning to see his bright eyes shining at me on his walk by to the park. We had never spoken a word in that time, but how I felt his kindness lift me from the alley and placed me back into the house from which I came long before the turmoil of the world.

The day we did speak, I knew this boy had come for a reason. He sat down carefully on the wet cement and looked up at me with curiosity. A smile spread across his tiny face as he asked, “Are you God?”

I stared at the innocent boy for a while before deciding on answering. “I am.”

Instead of walking away, as I thought he would, he simply smiled and crossed his legs. “So you’re going to fix all of this, right?”

I would have thought the child was crazy had I not been looking at his serious face. Hopeful even. At least one person needed hope during these times, so I decided on continuing the game. “Of course, but first I’ll need to find my magical sphere.”

“Where is it?”

“I lost it when I was your age.”

“Well, I’ll help you find it.” The boy stood. “What does it look like?”

Like a little girl sitting between her parents on Christmas Eve while the snow falls softly outside with the fireplace glowing their smiling faces. But I couldn’t tell him that, he wouldn’t understand, so I decided on saying, “A tiny green sphere.”

For years, I filled his head with nonsense. And this nonsense had filled up the emptiness of the world, of the alley, of my stomach, and of my heart. He had never found the sphere in those afternoons as I never thought he would. Then he disappeared for a while. I waited anxiously every day hoping he’d turn the corner with those bright eyes. But he never came. I wondered what had taken the child from me and it seemed like I’d never get my answer. Years passed and I grew older. The economic depression worsened. And I now yearned to see the little boy.

It was a snowy December day when a man in a suit and tie walked down the alley. He c***ed his head and smiled. I recognized the bright eyes immediately. He explained that he had gone away to school and began his own family. He apologized for not writing or stopping by earlier. Then, with his eyes shining brighter than ever, he drew a green glass marble from his pocket. I smiled and took it in my own hands.

“Is that it?”

I tucked it in my pocket before I could tear up. He had remembered after all those years. “It is. Thank you, Ginger.”

I gave up on that alleyway shortly after that and roamed the streets. That little boy had changed my life, now it was my turn to change someone else’s.