THE VILLAGE

The child, carefree, ran behind his toy ball. Down the street, without paying any attention to his surroundings. As if guiding the kid through the avenues, the ball didn’t stop, and neither did the child. He didn’t know where he was going, but he didn’t care.

He ran by the fruit shop, through the streets yellowed by misery and dust, past a small pond where the people did their laundry, next to a man who was resting against a wall beneath its shade, below the feet of a wandering merchant, past a cat, a dog and again back to where he had already been. The kid ran energetically, not paying attention to the comments from all the people his run had annoyed, who were tired from pushing their carts filled with the goods they had not been able to sell at the market, which would have to wait until the market would open again next Saturday.

The ball kept on rolling and rolling, and the kid followed, almost desperate, like an animal chasing its prey with the fear that it will getaway. He passed by a dozen streets, hopping around like a hare. He was so focused on catching his toy that he could not notice the small bump on the floor which his foot crashed on, sending him flying into the ground. He fell violently on the pavement. His head was spinning, and his leg, which had been scratched in the accident, was hurting him, though only lightly. Besides that, he was luckily unharmed. However, he had lost track of his toy ball.

He swept off the dust from his clothing and sat on the ground. This is when he noticed the silence. He had never wandered so far from home on his own, and even though the street he found himself in was similar in shape to all the others in town, it was eerily different, in an indescribable way.

All doors and windows were closed shut, and they did not seem to be willing to open any time soon. It was almost like they had all been painted and carved on the lime walls, and were not a part of reality.

In all of his few years, the kid had never felt more alone. He was exhausted from the heat of the daylight’s final hours and knew he had burnt up all of his remaining energy, in case he would want to run anymore. He decided to turn around and go back the way he came.

The darkness of the night was slowly consuming the streets, replacing the red from the afternoon’s sun with black. The shadows of all things were stretching at an unusual speed as if they were trying to reach the young boy in his journey up the dimly lit pathway, which constantly grew narrower from the night’s efforts to eliminate all traces of light.

Her mother had been carrying along with the symptoms of both poverty and osteoporosis, so she had asked him to brush, feed, and otherwise take care of the three goats they had painstakingly managed to obtain.

He was already old enough to learn the skill of goat-keeping, and in one or two years he would be old enough to take the herd to pasture, so they wouldn’t have to pay someone else to take care of the creatures. This would give her mother more liberty to work on the fabrication of the cheese, which, with plenty of help from her neighbors, she tried to sell at the market.

The kid’s mind was busy with these seemingly superfluous thoughts as he walked up the street, feeling a mixture of both premature excitements about someday becoming an “adult man” and sadness for the loss of his ball, which he had saved up for so long to afford.

He was also hoping to one day be able to fend for himself and his mother from the abuse of their neighbors, who never gave his mother even half of the earnings from the cheese sales.

About halfway there he noticed he had not crossed paths with anyone, not even a lonely miserable beggar. The town was supposed to be about to undergo a drastic change. The streets should be about to be crawling with activity. In a matter of minutes, the district was supposed to switch from a family neighborhood to an alcohol-flooded suburb.

Children were tucked in bed. Men and women walked out from their houses, with their eyes glassy from exhaustion, hunger, and fatigue. They were going to laugh, scream and talk with their friends, making so much noise that almost no kid was able to sleep. Sometimes during these hours, the younglings climbed onto their rooftops out of boredom and slight hints of curiosity, to be able to better witness the chaos that always ensued after the eerie transformation that took place at nightfall. The strident melodies filled with trumpets and drums marked the pace of those anxious creatures garnished with cheap cigarettes and bottles of beer, whose mouths were thrice the normal size, and their eyes were swollen yet inhumanely open as if looking everywhere, but not seeing anything, unable to notice souls or moments.

All kids had seen these creature’s appearances after being noticed in their rooftops by the monsters below. Even though they were not allowed to be awake that late into the night, they were never reprimanded the following morning, because, as they already knew, conscience went to bed early every night.

This day, however, no one had left their homes. There was no one to be seen anywhere. The same old streets had never been so empty, so clean. Similar to the street where the kid had tripped over, all doors were closed tight. The few windows that did not have curtains, nor were barricaded with wooden planks, showed nothing in their insides, but deep black darkness, as if there was nothing inside but a hollow void once one had passed the house’s entrance.

A strange empty starless night had taken over the sky, giving the ambient a weird artificial feeling. An almost supernatural dim white light illuminated the streets and created strange pale contrasts between the walls, the floor, and the windows.

-The moon has never shined so bright. —Thought the kid, but when he raised his gaze to look for the said moon, he couldn’t find it anywhere in the sky.

The sound of a lonely water droplet hitting the surface started to echo around the walls from the street, and in the background of absolute silence, that quiet noise became monstrously strong.

- What is this place? Did I take a wrong turn? – But that was hard to believe, due to the geography of the entire place being extremely simple to understand and memorize. The child’s Neighborhood was up the mountain, whereas the market was down the slope. A few hundred yards up the mountain after his house was the hill where the Goats did pasture every morning,

- but what was beyond that? What is there on the other side of the hill? Did I walk by to the other side without noticing? That’s impossible… Up there is cold, and they say that nocturnal beasts block the way during the night. -

The rhythmic sound of the wáter droplet never went off-tempo “tup tup tup tup” and the entire place seemed increasingly unreal, as the pale light vomited by some of the nearby alleyways grew in intensity, eventually forcing the boy to squint as he passed by said alleyways, whereas other street entrances seemed to engulf light, preventing the kid from seeing even a meter deep into them.

The Young boy felt an eerily disturbing sensation as he was standing in front of the house of his best friend, only a block away from his own home. He felt lost as if he had lost all sense of direction, his stomach started to ache. He wanted to see his mother… or a friendly face… or even goat. Such was his loneliness. He knocked on his friend’s door, as well as on five other houses, yet no one answered, nor did they give the slightest sign of life, which, somehow, didn’t surprise him.

Every time his Little fingers crashed into a different door, there was no sound to be Heard from the knocking, and instead of feeling the rough wooden frame of centuries-old doors, he felt as if he was knocking on a Wall. Trying to open them didn’t even seem worth attempting.

It seems unreal, how a change in the ambient could transform the place, rendering it all so unnervingly fantastical, so lacking in answers, shrouded in such a dark mystery. The kid sat on the step of an entrance and attempted to get his thoughts in order. Wind? There was no current to be felt. It wasn’t cold, rainy, or foggy, either. After a while, the kid started to wonder whether it even made sense for the night to last for so long. – How long have I been lost? – The only thing that kept him aware of the passing of time, that which seemed to anchor him to the slow pace of seconds, was that incessant water droplet noise. He stood up and decided he might as well try to find the source of the sound. After all, it was the only thing he was sure that existed.

He noticed a sudden, fast movement to his right, but when he turned around to see what it was, he wasn’t able to find anything. That strange sensation that something had happened just outside his limited field of view was accompanied by the crushing noise of absolute silence. The kid was staggered, desperate to notice what it was, to be able to see it, to react to it. He stood still and paid close attention to his surroundings, hoping to be able to catch the next movement.

He didn’t have to wait for long until a similar event happened to his left. This one, he did see. But what he saw, made his entire body tremble with uneasiness, his once childishly happy face paled at the sight. Without being able to conjure the strength to scream, he started running. Streets upon streets, unending, all empty, all silenced, all the same.