A pair of feet stuck out from under the rubble.

The EMT noticed them: bright red sneakers smothered with soot, white laces undone and strewn across the ground. She made her way over, stumbling through the ruins of the city, careful to not twist her ankle on the debris. The bombs were dropped a day before. Only now did the first responders arrive. 

She struggled for a moment to clear away the pile of bricks, steel, and stone, exposing the little boy to the light. The EMT was no stranger to death, and she assumed she would get used to it, but the boy’s lifeless face still made her skin crawl. She looked into his eyes, glazed and soulless as if they belonged to a doll. His limbs were contorted and broken into gaps between the ruins. She bent down, pieces of the walls sliding under her feet, and placed one finger on the boy’s neck to be safe. There was no pulse, and the body was cold, past the point of resurrection. He was long dead.

She crouched next to the boy. The EMT wished she could look into the hazy eyes of the dead and know everything about them. She would try to assign lives to the bodies, but there was only so much she could muster when there was so little she knew.

Maybe this boy slumped in the rubble could have been something, done something to make this cruel world a slightly better place. Perhaps he could have brought joy and peace to the people around him, given a chance. Her heart ached as she lifted the boy from his grave and gently set his eyelids closed, shielding those muddy eyes from the light for the last time. The boy had a whole world in front of him that he would never get to see.

There was no way to know who this boy was and what he could have been. That fact tormented the EMT for as long as she lived. She knew nothing about the people salvaged from the wreck. The boy cradled in her arms would join the masses of nameless bodies buried with no memory of who they were and who they could have been. He would disappear six feet into the earth. He would never cross anyone’s mind, and no one would speak his name. He would vanish without a trace, like salt to the sea.

She silently hoped that wherever the boy went after death, he would find someone to call him by name. Someone that knew who he was, someone who saw the boy as more than a digit in a death toll.

For now, there would be no name on his gravestone.

No memory to keep him alive.