Salty blooded lips, veins charged with adrenalin, ears ringing and hounds on her heels. This is how Eli raced across the cobblestones, raced ahead of accusatory cries and yowls and rushed towards her imagined destiny, the future being divined by threads torn from tapestries of the past and from the walls of sleeping merchant manors.
Another child was moving in the opposite direction, a boy named Yuri with wind streaming through his long dirty brown hair, cloth package clutched to chest, feet rubbed raw and running, running from what he no longer considered home in an attempt to find somewhere, anywhere, a place of appreciation and love.
Of course, they collided.
“You idiot!” fumed Eli as she scrambled around to pick up the fresh fruit spilt from her hands. Seeing the boy still lying in the dirt, fresh tears forming rivulets down his dust-caked face, she grew exasperated, pulled him to his feet and towards an alleyway safe from pursuers.
Under the sudden darkness of surrounding buildings and stretched canvas ceiling, leaning back against a cold wall, tense muscles relaxing and pulse slowing, there came about a sudden reversal. After getting angry at Yuri, she was now engulfed by misery; throat clenched and tight eyes and broken sobbing. In the corner of her vision, black dogs raced past the hiding place entrance, making the dazzling sunlight flicker as when hands pass before a candle.
“Hey, girl,” Yuri whispered. “Why, what’s wrong? You scared o’ the mutts?”
“No! Nothing like that,” she managed to blurt. Eli struggled to keep her thoughts to herself; the thoughts of being pathetic, forlorn and without hope, worthless, and to meet somebody the same, oh, so pitiable and wretched, what was wrong with this world – and then a wide naive smile flowed over Yuri’s ruddy face, wiping her pain and damming the damning feelings, setting her heart alight.
Live for the moment.
