The green-black water laps up against the concrete lip at the young boy’s feet, stirred backwards by the other, larger boys. The young boy looks down at the green algae and black lichen and the silver pearls of air that form the carpet beneath his shoes, notes how it all breathes to life as the waves subtly crest once or twice through their fabric. Then he looks at the water itself, the forbidden water, where he, and he alone, is not supposed to go. His eyes focus on the black squiggly shapes dispersing and converging, confused, the question-mark tadpoles. And then his eyes blur.
He swipes his forearm absently across his face, smearing the dampness. He knows he’s not supposed to cry. But he wants to not be left alone. He wants to follow, he wants to join his brother and the other big kids, as they cut the darkness and make ripples and echoes in the tunnel ahead.
His brother had been adamant.
“Stay here,” he had commanded, as though speaking to a dog. And to nip any and all protests in the bud, he had added: “The only reason you’re here is because I’ve got to watch you.”
The logic of that statement still escapes the young boy. He reverses it in his six year old head (something he does on occasion), and for some reason, it comes out as a question: “I’ve got to watch you because that’s the only reason I’m here?”
The young boy steps reluctantly away from the shallow shore, the ground sucking at his feet. He turns his back to the large rectangular tunnel at the end of the rain drainage canal he’s in, the tunnel that cuts deep and dark into the slope of the weedelia covered hillside, the tunnel where his brother’s echoes mix in reverberations with the hoots of his two friends. He walks to the drier floor of the canal, where the algae and lichens have turned to black powder. Then he crawls up one of the angled slopes. The concrete is warm and stained red-orange, having soaked in much of the afternoon rays. Halfway up he sits, then lies, six year old arms folded under his head, as he stares up at the cloudless sky.
A cloudless span of time passes.
He hears a distant scraping roar, and other voices, not his brother’s. He peers far to his left, towards the other end of the long canal, the end opposite the tunnel. He sees a couple of familiar figures, the two skaters of his neighborhood, Jason and Troy, doing half-pipes on the inclines. They, like his brother’s friends, haven’t eyes low enough to see him. So he pretends not to see them. He folds his forearms across his eyes, trying to black out the world.
But the sound of those wheels, like tears in paper, grows closer and closer.
Soon, he can actually feel the vibrations and the wind, and he has to open his eyes.
“Yo runt,” says Jason, with flat eyes. “Get out of the way. You messin’ up our run.”
He’s above the young boy, at the top of the slope he’s on, the fingers of one hand meshing with the chainlink fence. His right foot’s on the tail of his board, and the only thing keeping the green plastic wheels from careening down is his other hand holding the board’s eager nose high in the air.
Jason’s friend Troy, meanwhile, is at the dirty base of the canal, looking up at the young boy and grinning like a shark.
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