You and Ramzan had shared the same crooked row of houses for ten years. Everyone called her “Babushka Ramzan” and she wore the name like a quiet crown — proud, grateful, a small beacon in the wreckage of the old Noobic Union. Her garden was a miracle: tomatoes swollen and red against the dust, beets the size of fists, apples round and tart. She gave you bags of produce as if it were nothing, and carried baskets to families who hadn’t eaten in days. When food ran out for others, she would somehow stretch hers thinner and still hand out more.

You were a hunter by trade — trapping moles, snaring rabbits, dispatching the rodents that threatened root and seed. The meat you brought home you always pressed into her hands. She refused it at first, cheeks flushed with stubborn pride, insisting she could not accept what she would later offer to another. You argued, you shoved the parcels into her arms, and she would relent with a soft, embarrassed smile that made you feel both guilty and needed. You’d sent small sums when you could after you learned her husband died in 1982 of something the doctors called radiation cancer; you scribbled notes, dropped off cards, tried to be neighborly in a world that had thinned the meaning of that word.

So when you pulled up to the metro that bitter morning, your mind was full of lists — the market, the ration line, the rusted turnstile you’d been meaning to fix. A thin woman descended the single staircase ahead of you, small and bent with the steady, shuffling rhythm of age. You felt the familiar impatience like a fever — deadlines and hunger and the weight of everything owed to everyone. For fifteen seconds you told yourself to breathe, to be decent. Then the patience tore.

“Move, you old hag!” you snapped, the words ripping out of you louder than you meant. And before thought could catch up, anger became motion. Your foot lashed out. She pitched, a small figure toppling like a doll. Screams erupted, raw and high. You saw her hit—twice, then again—and the world snapped into a cold, slow clarity.

She rolled onto her back on the cold, concrete floor. At first you blinked at a stranger — and then your throat closed. It was Ramzan. Her face — that gentle face you’d known for a decade — was a ruin: a wide cut across her forehead, blood slick and warm in the pale light; one leg grotesquely bent at an impossible angle; purple blooms spreading like ink under her skin. Her breath came ragged and shallow, then stilled.

For a long heartbeat you simply stood, frozen as concrete. The trade winds of your life — the hunting, the giving, the small kindnesses — suddenly felt brittle and meaningless in the shadow of what you had done. Your stomach twisted; bile rose. Your hands, the hands that had filled her wicker baskets with food, trembled uncontrollably.

You dropped to your knees in the concrete without even knowing you’d moved. Shame and fear slammed together like fists against your ribs. The world around you — the bakery lights, the distant rumble of the metro, the trampling feet of a city that never learned to stop — blurred into a single, horrifying point: Ramzan, bleeding, broken, your neighbor, the woman who fed entire streets with a generosity you could never match.

You fumbled for your phone. Your voice when it emerged was small and raw, not the angry bark that had launched her fall. “Help… please. Someone—call—” The words broke as blood stained into her hair and your hands shook with a grief that felt too big to hold.