[ WP ] `` How much of a hero are you , if all you 've managed to save is yourself ? ''

They spoke to him like he had done something extraordinary. As if it needed to be explained to him, his actions, and what they meant. It was almost condescending. 
 
 The waves of reporters parted and made a path for him at each event on the tour. With each stop, there were fewer people; with each swarm of reporters, the parting wave grew smaller. 
 
 They called him hero. They meant it. And those who looked up from the ranks of faces in the crowd, mostly plebian and filthy, with soft eyes and torn coats, they believed it - they saw it. 
 
 Raul did n't understand. but the markets were failing, the jobs were thinning and it was never wise to refuse a free meal, let alone several dozen on the path around the country. He was paraded around, like a new face of hope for the working class that he came from, as if his life had become a metaphor, his story a tale of triumph to be exemplified. 
 
 But he could not see the need for it. Could not stand that they were making him out to be a great man, for this. Why not any of the other men who'd been trapped in the mine? 
 
 He swallowed as the lights flickered on in the studio and revealed the shadowed faces of the audience, waiting on what he had to say. And the smiling dead-eyed co-hosts of the New Mo-Town Morning Show. And the line producers and his handlers waiting in the wings, smiling nervously and encouragingly with shiny black shoes and thumbs up. 
 
 And he gazed in the reflection of the complimentary glass of clean water they'd given him; at his own face in the tessellating water, polished and tired and hardly recognizable now. 
 
 And he realized it's because he'd lived.
