“What are you doing there, kid?”

He is about nine and chunky, with a squarish head and sparse black curly hair. His brown-striped t-shirt has a quarter-sized ketchup spot near the center of his belly. He stiffens up quickly, as if the voice was from God.

“Nothing. I’m doing nothing.”

“You go on home. I don’t got time to keep you out of my yard.”

The boy looks around towards where he hears the voice, and squints his eyes hard, crinkling his forehead. A dog in a yard several houses down barks at something new and surprising. Unable to find the voice, the boy turns and heads down the road in the opposite direction, looking once over his shoulder back at the yard.

The sky is like a plucky pastel peacock fanning, an explosion of purple and pink and orange, as the sun drops on the horizon. The air is cool- a welcome escape from the day’s heat- and as he walks forward, he doesn’t see the sky or the lady beating a rug in her littery courtyard, or the car mirror laying in the dirt beneath his left foot, on which he turns his ankle and plummets onto his side like a trash bag full of jello.

Up the road, a car turns onto the lane, lights raking along the walls of the tiny houses until the beams come to rest on the kid. The sedan approaches and then suddenly lurches to a stop. A woman in a navy colored dress and pumps pops out, seeing the crumpled body on the ground.

“Oh my- oh my! Are you alright?”

The boy, smarting from his tweaked ankle and scraped knee, continues to lay on the ground, and from his dirty wincing face, opens one eye and smiles.

“Did you see it?”

“Did I see it? See what? What did you see?”

“The animal! It was a lion or bear or something! It jumped on me and knocked me down and went to bite my neck, but I hit it real good with this”, he gestured, pointing at the mirror.

“My goodness!” Her eyes were large and incredulous, and she bent down, staring at his bleeding knee. She stood up and looked around her, her face in a question mark.

Down the street the dog barked again, jagged snips at something it wanted to attack.

“Was it… a dog?”

“It could have been”, he said. The street lamps were lighting up, and in the gravel yard two houses behind her, a stocky middle-aged bald man was sitting in a lawn chair drinking a beer, watching her talk to the boy.

“Arturo!” he yells. “Arturo- get the hell out of the street! What are you doing?”

Recognizing the voice, the boy pushes his thick body up, and once standing, grabs his left elbow. “Damn beasts”, he mutters to the woman, tears finally welling in his eyes.

“Lady, be careful in this neighborhood.”

Behind the woman, next to the car, they suddenly hear the sound of glass shattering.

She turns, and behind the shards on the ground by her car, she sees the short man standing like a stump in the yard.

“I know where you’ve been!” he yells. “I know where you’ve been.”

“I gotta go”, the boy quietly mumbles. The woman, wide-eyed, watches as he hobbles around her and the idling car.

And as the rock zipped by.

—

Photo Credit: “Bucharest” by Matei Domnita via Flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 license.