FACES

He stood there peering in, his pupils bounced around in his eyes with a near hopelessness. Weighing down in his hand a light weight that gravity rudely decided to pull and tug until his arms could barely take it.

A white mass of a car parked, an opportunity to rid himself of the deathly clasps of poverty with a little aid. He wasn’t begging. He knew he had to work for those he had depending on that little morsel he could surmount in every moment of his breath and consciousness.

With a desperate rush, he made his way to the car. The tracks in the souls of his feet barely left a mark on the dusty and worn road that had long cooked his feet raw and left a thickened leather where softness once was. Sweat beading out of his exposed dark ashed skin, chapped lips denied color by his greedy stomach that never filled, he signaled the driver…

Pointing at the tray of boiled eggs in his other arm balanced against his boney lightly heaving chest. A little too skinny for his age. A little too old for his age. He could barely remember ever having had a childhood. This child was never a child to begin with. Nothing more than a curse to his parents for being the extra mouth and a burden to the world that found him worthless enough to never get a break.

“No!” the now parked driver angrily yelled, comfortably seated in the padded chair. The desperate mass of venders hovered around the car like flies on a pile of stink. The stalking vultures remained around his car. In a lazy push of a button with his mushy pink finger the window came down and daggers from his mouth flew into the masses around him, leaving all wounded and retreating with their tails filling their unfashionably induced thigh gaps.

Except, for him, he stood there determined to get a sell because they, the silver spooned men who rode in their unfeeling machines, sometimes drove people off and would buy from those who remained.

The driver pushed his button again and rebuilt the glass wall between them. That allowed the starving aged boy to see the privileged world of others but never quite touch it. In his existence he potentially never will despite his reach.

His feet settled, cracked soles etching their markings in the dusty earth, “Boiled eggs,” a frail voice whispered into the air toward the glass wall. Soundless words that barely broke the barrier.

“Boiled Eggs!” he shouted as if it was worth his dying breath. This time the glass did shudder.

The Driver’s eyebrows grew closer, the folds between them making nearly futile efforts to mountain between the furiously tugging patches of hair that forced a near merge. His face reddened, purpled even, as his neck snapped toward the window, jaw tight and nostrils flaring… a moment longer and horns would have sprouted from his head.

He opened the door suddenly, pushing the poorly balanced boy who stood on his flesh-bare match stick legs, as if he was merely smacking an irritating mosquito that had hovered to close to the ear.

The boy’s morsels of sustenance grabbed by cruel and greedy gravity, smashed and cracked on the endlessly hungry earth that swallowed far too many souls. He stumbled back a step or two, his arms desperately reaching to save what they could. As quickly as the door opened it shut.

Having gotten his fill, the now furiously blinking driver, eyebrows ducked as if to hide in his eyelids drove off. The sudden rude scratch of the unfeeling machine’s tires awaked the dust in a brief angry blow out that completely engulfed the boy. Swallowing him whole in a storm of dust that instantly whisked away the markings the soles of his feet had drawn into the earth.

The boy who dared not sniffle, fell to his knees attempting to salvage what he could of what would have been today’s profit. What would have been today’s free breath had just turned into today’s filth filled mouth full. Having collected all the broken bits that could temporarily silence his gaping stomach, he stumbled back to where he stood before with the soul in his eyes searching back and forth in near hopelessness for the next sell.