THE AIR WE SHARE

On Maple Street, the drains clog every monsoon, and for three days the children play barefoot in water that is equal parts rain and runoff. Old Mrs. Okafor keeps her windows shut against the smell from the illegal dump at the end of the lane, yet her asthma still worsens each summer. Down the road, the Kowalski family boils every drop of drinking water because the municipal pipes leak somewhere nobody has bothered to find. Nothing on Maple Street looks like an emergency. There are no ambulances, no quarantines, no headlines — only a slow, ordinary accumulation of coughs, skin rashes, fevers, and missed school days that everyone has quietly accepted as “just how it is here.”