The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning, which was the same as every other morning in the sense that Alex woke up cold and the sky was the color of old concrete and there was nothing immediately ahead of him that resembled a reason to move faster than necessary. He was seventeen years old and had learned, over the past several weeks, to regulate his energy with the precision of someone who understood that the gap between enough and not enough was narrower than most people ever had reason to discover.
He and his younger sister Marta had been sleeping behind the Merkur supermarket on the eastern edge of Brno for twenty-six days. He knew the exact number because he had been counting from the first night, not from pessimism but from the habit of a person who tracks what he can measure when everything else is outside his control. The spot they had found was a narrow channel between the rear wall of the building and the row of industrial waste containers, which provided shelter from the wind on three sides and, on the coldest nights, a faint residual warmth from the compressor unit mounted to the building’s exterior. It was not a good place to sleep. It was, however, a better place than several others they had tried.
Marta was fourteen. She had their mother’s face and their grandmother’s stubbornness, a combination that had served her well in some contexts and made her difficult to manage in others. She did not complain about the cold with any frequency, which Alex appreciated, though he sometimes wished she would complain just slightly more so he could have the relief of addressing it. Her silence on the subject was its own kind of weight.
They had accumulated a small system around themselves. Two sleeping bags obtained from a church donation center six weeks prior, one significantly warmer than the other, which Alex always gave to Marta. Three cardboard boxes broken flat and layered beneath the sleeping bags as insulation from the ground. A backpack each containing their remaining possessions, which in Alex’s case meant a change of clothes, a notebook he no longer wrote in, a charger for the phone he no longer had, and the photograph of their mother he had carried since she died two years earlier. In Marta’s backpack there was a paperback novel she had already read four times, a small zippered pouch with their remaining documents and identification cards, and the wooden hair comb that had belonged to their grandmother.
