The morning air was cold and penetrated the shabby windows of Sergio’s apartment. When the bluntness of the cold coiled under his sheets, he awoke.
    Sergio knew that it took his apartment hours to warm up with the heat on, so he decided to make a pot of Folgers while he waited. He crawled out of bed with his thick blankets around him and stumbled half-awake into the small kitchen.
    He tucked his fingertips in between the blinds above the sink and peered out the window. The sky was gray and riddled with dark clouds on the verge of shedding rain.
    Sergio glanced at the street. It was silent outside, and it was the first time he could think of that he didn’t hear the shrieking of car horns or the loud, muffled bass of a passing car.
    When his brown eyes settled on the brick ground, Sergio’s heart stopped – the rhythm of life within him taking a sudden rest. There was a body, pale and nude, lying in the street. People were gathered around it, staring. An uncomfortable feeling settled in the well of his stomach. It felt like it was squeezing his insides.
    Sergio raced back to his room and threw on a pair of jeans, a wrinkled t-shirt, and a coat. He grabbed his keys and sprinted out of the apartment, disregarding heat and the fresh pot of coffee.
    He wasn’t sure what he would do once he got there. What if it was dead? Could he handle seeing a dead body up close? Sergio thought of concentration camps and the pasty dead that were dumped into the mouths of ditches, and he felt the uneasiness inside him clench.
    Sergio stepped out of the brownstone apartment building and set his eyes on the sights around him. His heart, which had skipped and beat sluggishly moments before, was now wildly soloing, and his breath stretched out of his dry mouth.
    The entire world was dark. All of downtown seemed to be without power, or still asleep, and there were no signs of automobiles. Sergio studied the body, trying to see the slightest swell of the chest to gauge if it was alive, but it remained still like a sleeping child.
    Sergio wasn’t sure what had pulled him out of the blissful ignorance of his apartment, but alas, here he was, drowning in the cold. His feet began moving, and he walked around the columns of people. When Sergio stopped and pressed his right knee into the brick street, he felt a sob sliding its way up his body. In front of him was a woman who looked like a sleeping angel. She had long black hair, a handful of tiny brown spots on her slim neck, and open, light-blue eyes. They stared into Sergio’s and he felt lost.
    Sergio reached out and lightly grazed her cheek. She felt as though she could have been frozen. He sighed heavily and watched his breath hang in the air and then disappear.
Tears dotted Sergio’s eyes, but he blinked them away.
    Sergio had no answers or anything he could drape his palms and fingers around. Instead, he was left with the facts, which left him hungry to know why this had taken place. He had never been particularly religious, but in the heart of this moment, Sergio prayed.
    As he shut his eyes, Sergio remembered the last time he prayed. He was nine years old, and his father had a seizure while driving him back from his grandparents’ house. The drive was eighteen miles, but snow had greased the streets and ice had formed.
    Sergio’s father was epileptic, and began convulsing at the wheel. The car hit a patch of black ice, and the car spun around and flipped over. It continued spinning and rolling for several seconds, which seemed like lifetimes to Sergio, until the car slammed into the trunk of a tree.
    Sergio sat in the car, cold, watching his father’s body contorted, but no longer shaking. Blood was spilling from his stomach, and Sergio prayed to God to wake his father up and stop him from leaking. He wasn’t sure how long he sat next to his father praying, but it was long enough for the night to take his father away and for Sergio to believe that God had not heard his prayers. After that night, he never invested much in the abilities of the Divine.
    Here he was, nineteen years later, and he found himself praying as hard as he had when he was nine. Echoes of his young prayers rang in his skull, and transported him back into the car. He could almost smell the scent of gas and hear the hiss of the broken engine and the exhaling wind.
    Sergio thought of his father, the man that taught him to speak to God, and the twisted face and open eyes he was left with after the crash – eyes like the woman on the ground.
    It hurt for him to return to the entity that took his father from him in such a grizzly manner, but he had nowhere else to turn. God had breathed into Sergio and left him sorry for the girl in the street. He was also sorry for not being able to touch her and cause her to rise and walk away.
    Sergio rose from the bricks and slowly walked past the onlookers on their cell phones and back into the apartment building, as the howl of sirens flooded the street. He returned to his room, which was still bitterly cold, drank a cup of coffee, and did not look out the window again.
    Later, after night had spread through the sky, Sergio turned on the news. Two stories caught his attention. The first was on a blackout that had struck most of downtown.
    The other story had to do with the arrest of five mortuary technicians and a friend. They were all in their mid-twenties, and shooting a scene for an independent film.
    The technicians had used transport trucks belonging to the city morgue to move three cadavers for an early morning shoot. However, after the bodies were spread out and the filming began, the blackout hit, taking the majority of the lights of downtown with it. Unaware if terrorists had attacked or if some other tragedy had occurred, the men quickly fled in fear, accidentally leaving one of the bodies behind.
After the story finished, Sergio shut off the television and sat for a long time staring at the blank screen and thinking of the day. Finally, he allowed himself to weep – not in sadness, but to vent the emotions he had been carrying for almost two decades. The hurt and indifference toward anything Divine washed away with his tears, and he didn’t feel alone anymore. He could feel his father smiling from wherever Heaven was, and Sergio forgave God for taking him, and forgave himself for losing his way. For the second time in his life, he had witnessed God work in mysterious ways.