Alone, part 3

I stand in a muddy gaze amoung the few survivors like myself. The earth is in a rubble all around us, and our lives, we realize, shall never be the same again. I wring the water out of my long braid and attempt to do the same to my hair. There are people pressed up against the glass windows of nearby office buildings and apartments. I look for where my father worked, Bunta Yasu, and see that the lower floor windows were knocked out by the flood. Akio, which is what I call my father, works on the second floor. All the windows to the 4th floor are knocked out. I stumble toward it anyway, my bare feet cacked with mud, my dirty skirt and shirt clinging to me because of it's dampness. I feel a sharp pain in my left foot. When I sit on a piece of depris to examine it, I find a piece of glass. Looking around, I find that the mud is full of glass from the windows of the buildings. People near by are figuring this out for themselves. I see a small, naked, dirty child cry in pain when he steps on a rather large shard. Adults seem to be in a daze, wandering around. People are rushing out of the buildings, coming toward us. One woman stoops to pick up the little boy and she carry's him inside. Other people are bringing out blankets and clothes. I stop a man that bears the same name of the company where Akio works. "Excuse me sir, do you know of a man named Hu Xi? He worked at Bunta Yasu." He shakes his head. "Gone with the great wave, child. Crushed under a building. I am sad to say I sw it with my own eyes." I feel my own eyes grow large, and suddenly I am screaming at this random stranger. "No, no, he's not dead, he can't be!" I throw myself at the man, beating him with my fists. He easily wraps my arms arond myself as I continue to scream "Akio is not dead! He is not dead; he can't be dead!" He only steers me toward a woman in a white uniform, perhaps from the hospital down the street. She wraps a blanket around my shoulders, rubbing my back and forcing a paper cup filled with hot tea into my hands. It's then that I realize I'm shivering, and I sip it, even though it's a little too hot and burns at my now raw throat. She leads me down the tangled, muddy streets, toward a hospital that looks beaten up but is still standing. Before I know it I'm on a cot next to the same dirty child that had been near me on the stree. He is a little cleaned up now, and has a bandage on his foot. I don't think twice before laying down and sobbing myself into a fitfull sleep.