Weepers

Ed is a weeper. A professional weeper. He's a card-carrying member of Local 312, an eccentric union of mourners, hired for funerals and wakes, services and burials. But all that feeling can wear a man down, and the tears don't come like they used to. Especially as the normals, the privileged non-weepers, appear to feel less and less every day, even as the world gets worse and worse. Lately it's been drier and hotter than hell itself. And then one morning a new kid shows up. No belongings, no parents, no name. He's young, scrawny, non-union. Ed can't help but feel a fondness for him. The kid never sheds a tear, but he is charged with a strange, divine power to make others feel. He leaves a trail of something - call them miracles, call them disasters - in his wake. And then he disappears.