Easy holiday afternoon

“I would like something to do” said the boy. His sweaty hands scrubbing treasure from his pockets. He found glass marbles, pebbles, matchsticks, piece of wood, two coins and a picture of Jesus Christ.

“I would agree with you” said the other one, of age seven or eleven. It doesn’t matter much because he was as bored as the other.

The boy scratched his black brown hair. Like a rat scurrying in a blanket, he made ridges and curls and snowflakes.

He made pop sounds with his tongue and looked vaguely lost: his cotton candy mind racing.

The sun was high up and the streets were all dry. The window sights were sad scenes for two bored souls.At two in the afternoon, life was at a stand-by.

They passed seven whole minutes observing a vegetable cart going "Thakaaaali! Venkaaaayam!". Three minutes and five seconds, shouting like lewd buttons at some unsuspecting little girl who retorted "Poda loose!"

That kid...she should have known better than to think of an answer to the question posed from the window above.  Two voices asking her if her knickers were brown.

And then...they got busy with each other.

One climbed high- really high. To the top of the book shelf. 

He pounced. His body arching. Feet spread out to cover air and wind, earth and paper. Like a ray of light bouncing of mirrors. Arching. Bending. A voice screeching. On to the back of the unsuspecting other.

And they rolled around over carpet and dust. Over spoons and bowls and wooden caskets. Into poems and songs and wool balls. Above and beyond the framed picture of thatha, who was looking nowhere in particular, in the year 1965. They smeared ink bottles .A laptop and pickle jars. Frozen butter. Flying like asteroids without an agenda.

They rolled and rolled over each other. Spilling and fluffing hair and sweat and laughter.

Until they were done with whatever it was that might be called play.

They lay flat on the floor, backs to the wood. The basked in their thoughts that muddled with dreams and plans of world domination. School master and homework. Kittens, cricket balls, ice cream cones. Bleeding noses. Spiders. The numbers twenty nine and forty five.

One dozed into dreamless slumber while the other scratched an itch that wasn’t there.

He wondered whether eating an orange might be a good idea.

And then...it happened.

She was perched outside, high over trees and lightning catchers, like a bird of stone. She was stroking her hair, pale eyes staring lidless. Her gaze cooled the air draining it of hope. Weighed down by wings, so lightly, the wind hissed into solemn submission and despair.
She hunts alone-nights and evenings,sordid mornings that wake up wrong. She blows chill mist through the ears into the listening soul.

And now...they had her despairing attention.

Loneliness, with frozen wing tips, brushed their hair, head and heart within.

The mirror threw back confounding shadows in the ominous amber of electric lights.

They could cling to each other but were too proud for that.

Traps and plastic baskets, live wires and fires were waiting to burn, hurt or eat alive from darkness under a bed.

So they threw up their heads to some mother above, streaming starlight at them from the night sky. Through the darkness, diminished by street lights, late traffic and whores, they mewed like babies and howled like the wretched-baying out a prayer at the moon.