It was a friday, I hated fridays the village crowded in the high summer heat and that’s last thing anyone wants or want to be, from where I was my place in the cool shade wasn’t to bad but it did stink of bodies all of them sweating from morning work, is just enough to make milk curdle. When I looked up at the sky the air shimmer with heat and humidity and every puddle from yesterday's storm are hot with swirling rainbow streaks of oil and grease. Markets deflates with everyone closing up their stalls for the day as I watched from my shade, merchants distracted careless makes it easy for me to take whatever I want from their wares but by the time I’m done, my pockets are filled with trinkets and an good apple for the road.
Not bad for my few minutes’ of work but as people move I let myself be take away by the human current as my hands dart in and out always in fleeting touches with some paper bills from a man’s pocket , a bracelet from a woman’s wrist but nothing to big. Some villagers are too busy shuffling along to notice me pickpocket in their midst. The high silt building for which the village name ( the Stilts very original) rise all around us about ten feet above the muddy ground but in the spring the lower bank is underwater even all right now it’s August when dehydration and sun sickness stalk the villages. That almost everyone looks forward to the first friday of each month when work and school end early.
As for me, I rather be in school learning nothing in a classroom full of children, not that I’ll be in school much longer, since my eighteenth birthday is coming and along with it conscription. I’m not apprenticed I don’t have a job so I’m just going to be sent to the war like all the other idle ones, no wonder there’s no work left what with every men, women, and child trying to stay out of the army.
Comments
Post a Comment