Sleep or the Sixth Birthday

When it rained, he really couldn’t tell if it were morning or evening. The clothes he had pegged a couple of days back, still hung limp and surrendered and vulnerable on the nylon strings. The warm bath buzzed in his ears as he stared out into this time that he could not place. The wrought-iron gate open-sesame-d without the traditional creak of rot and dried up lubrication. The rain-fresh slush peanut-buttered the sidewalks that smelt of earthworm manure and germs from up there that were slapped to the earth by the merciless rain.

Brown and black butterflies exploded in surprise from their rotting fruit stopovers, as the tree overhead seemed to shed a one and a two and a three of overnight’s treasured raindrops like tears onto a graveyard of tree-eggs below. And he walked by.

A simple brown dog with sunny eyeballs and drenched sprouts of whiskers shivered by, sniffing at the road and scurrying in reflex disappointment. Riverside sand piled in cones under construction sites spewed onto the black road like misplaced vomit. The road ran along a river that ran with it. A river that ran gray and black and polythene and revolting, as he balanced on the ledge of the canal to avoid the stickiness of the walkway. He could tell that it was morning, from the displeasure on the faces of morning children that waited like mourning widows at a funeral, for their rickety school buses that took them away from life. And he waited with them; not knowing that he was carelessly aping their expressions. They seemed representative of the world; both stuck in predicaments that weren’t too disparate.

He wished he could go back to sleep or to his sixth birthday. They were the only consolations that the rain offered. Lullabies in the comfort of the overnight warm fug indoors, and memories in the embraces of motherly fawning that came with rain-fevers.

And his bus stopped by. It took him away from life.