Utopian circus (City Book 2)

dirty old shoes and The Creepy Old Man was electric with the pulse of youth inflating his sunken veins and warming his discolored blotchy skin.

His hot sticky breath splashed across her neck and she felt an uneasy shiver run up her spine but it didn’t pull her from her concentration and still she stood rooted into the dusted earth, her mind unwavering, feeding directly from the energy bursting from her brother’s eyes like the craning of a flower, thirsted by the morning sun, molested not, by the creeping and crawling insect hungering for its little green leaves.

“What for do you wait, little girl, for what do you wait?” said The Creepy Old Man pressing his long skinny fingers against each other and licking his grimy lips.

“Try as you will to pick and pick away, but for the parts that you pick were never meant to stay” she said in riddle.

“Oh, this is fun” said The Creepy Old Man dancing on his tippy toes; entrenched in the shadow of the young girl who obeyed her focus as the fallen to the fall.

“Do you like puzzles?” asked The Creepy Old Man. He reached into his dirty old heshem bag and took from its bottomless pit a coloured cube that could turn on itself and with every turn, take one further from where they longed themselves to be. The Creepy Old Man laid his dirty old heshem bag on the ground by his feet and stretched his long skinny old arms over Safrine’s shoulders so that his hands held the coloured cube in front of her eyes.

The Creepy Old Man turned the coloured cube so that the side that was blue was no longer blue and the side that was red was no longer red.

And for each colour to do what of them was said, one had to find reason outside of their head. For to pursue of a colour one would leave another undone, unravel confusion and spoil all the fun but to twist with one’s fingers and not with one’s mind, could make whole of the colour unto every side.

“I long and I yearn; I hanker and pine, for someone to play 110