A Picture Heard Around the World

The ash and snow plummet down the mountain as predicted, invading homes and burying families like they had a hundred years before. The villagers, standing on rooftops, wave silently below layers of mud and bureaucracy. Amid the terrified wails, one girl, trapped by her collapsed life, stares out of the ruins. Millions witness her unceremonious death, mired in a grey purgatory. Though they predicted with charts and data what paths the rivers would consume, once disaster strikes they stare silently into the face of agony and watch as cold disease sweeps through her young body. For sixty hours her hands, already dead, clutch the pole before her as she weaves a blanket of tales to keep the hovering journalists close. In her final hours, hallucinations consume her, and as the sun sets on the third day, Omayra Sanchez releases her steady grip on reality and slips into the clay.