Marcus pressed his back against the cold stone wall, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Somewhere in the darkness behind him, footsteps echoed - steady, unhurried, confident. They knew he couldn't escape. They'd been chasing him for three days now.
His mind raced through options. The river to the east, but he couldn't swim well. The forest to the north, but they had dogs. The only way out was the wall itself - thirty feet of crumbling stone that hadn't been climbed in decades.
They say it's impossible, he thought, reaching for the first handhold. But impossible is just another word for "hasn't been done yet."
Behind me, the hunters.
Before me, the wall.
Stone cold, stone high,
Thirty feet of impossible.
My fingers find cracks
Where others saw smooth.
My feet find ledges
Where others saw truth.
They call it climbing.
I call it refusing
To let someone else
Define what I'm losing.
JULIET: O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.
ROMEO: [Aside] Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?
JULIET: 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
Maria stared at her phone, Tony's photo filling the screen. Why did he have to be from that family? The Delgados and her family, the Romeros, had been rivals since before she was born - competing businesses, old grudges, neighborhood lines drawn in invisible ink.
"It's just a name," she whispered to herself. "It doesn't define who he is."
But names meant everything here. Names meant loyalty. Names meant knowing whose side you stood on.
She thought about all the labels that divided them. Delgado. Romero. East side. West side. But Tony? Tony was kind. Tony listened. Tony saw her - not her last name, not her family's reputation, just her.
What's in a name? she wondered. Everything... and nothing at all.
Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, with sustained winds of 155 mph. The Category 4 storm caused widespread destruction, leaving approximately 3.4 million people without electricity. Damage estimates reached $90 billion, making it one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. The official death toll was later revised to 2,975.
When the winds finally stopped, I stepped outside to find my neighborhood transformed into a battlefield. The mango tree that had shaded three generations of my family lay across the street like a fallen soldier. Power lines draped over cars like streamers from some terrible party.
The statistics say 155 mph winds. They don't capture the sound - that freight-train roar that made me believe the world was ending. They don't capture my grandmother's prayers, mixing with the screaming wind. Numbers can't hold the weight of what we lost, or the strength of what we found in each other after.
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