Burning Earth

The sun slipped slowly burning into the earth, a half disc, a slight curve, then nothing but a retina after-image. The boy blinked, still looking at the sun after it died, then took pleasure from the crimson clouds lit a golden-orange along their lower edge, and the light breeze on his arms and face. He listened to the leaves in the two ash trees in his yard, rustling a gentle, wordless song. He soaked the draining warmth from the sidewalk into the soles of his small feet, then sated, turned, and entered his house. The front door of wooden slats and screen latched back into place. The yard where he stood moments before was empty save for trees and grass, and a new silver bicycle. The long, banana-shaped seat proclaimed it a ‘Silver Fox’. In the morning, it would be gone as if it had never been, and the boy would walk to school, shivering in the cool dawn as dogs barked and other children lurked in the shadows. More than the whiteness of his skin or his grades in school, the fear, that lack of animal aggression that is either gifted to the poor at birth or is not, would mark him.
The tragedy of the missing bike and the morning trial did not touch him yet, for a gift of the young is to live in the present. For the moment, he waged war with small, plastic military figures, until all but one lay prone and sightless, the lone victor standing upon a windswept hill until tears welled up in the young boys eyes at the nobility of the spectacle. Then came the unwelcome darkness in force, and after the nightly routine of paternal yells and more tears and quiet words spoken to an unseen father, the boy found himself in bed, the lights out, the house silent save for the demons creeping up to torment him through the night.
Twenty years passed, and the boy found himself living in the world of men. He did not realize how ill-equipped he was for this until a few years later. Somewhere along the way he failed to mature in the way the world defined maturity. Despite his past he was not a hard and practical person. He had the soul of a poet. He read in a book once that such souls are easily broken by the real world, and knew that to be true.

There once was a watch that had been broken, and was very sorrowful about this, but the idea of being ‘fixed’ was horrifying. Sad at being broken and loathing the idea of being fixed, the watch sunk into a deep depression.