“My mom hasn’t woken up for three days…”
The words came out of the little girl’s throat raw and broken as she pushed an old wheelbarrow down the cracked dirt road.
Her name was Lucía Morales, only seven years old, her hands swollen and blistered from the rusted handles biting into her skin.
Inside the wheelbarrow, wrapped in blankets far too thin for the biting dawn air, lay her newborn twin brothers.
Mateo.
Samuel.
They weren’t sleeping.
They were fighting—each shallow breath a fragile battle.Their home sat miles away from the nearest town, isolated among dry fields and silence. A year earlier, their father had been taken by a workplace accident, leaving Lucía and her mother, Carmen, clinging to survival through whatever work they could find. Hunger had become familiar. Fear, constant.
Carmen had given birth alone.
No doctor.
No midwife.
No one.
Two days later, burning with fever, she collapsed onto the mattress. Lucía waited for her to stir. She waited through the night. Through another morning.
Her mother never opened her eyes again.
When the crying of the babies grew weaker, Lucía understood something no child ever should.
So she did the only thing she could.
With shaking hands, she scribbled a crooked message in pencil—
I’m going to get help.
She tucked it beside her mother, lifted her tiny brothers into the wheelbarrow they once used to carry firewood, and began to walk.
The sun climbed slowly, cruelly, as if mocking her pace.
Each step burned.
Each kilometer stretched into forever.
The twins whimpered, their cries thin and exhausted. And whenever one of them went suddenly quiet, Lucía’s chest tightened with terror. She would stop, drop to her knees, and press her ear to their tiny chests, praying to hear breath.