100,000 words in.
It happened again, last night.
I was sitting in front of the genkan, trapped between the letter boxes, the old rusty-maroon couch, a pile of several hundred mismatched shoes. Two boys were on ladders, setting up curtains to block the red light in the front room from the black light in the next. This way, when people walked into the dorm, they could see the glowing Mayan bird on the floor with its fabulous beak pointing the way into the living room.
Through that door - framed by glowing green and orange and pink high-lighted designs, like relics of some native past - I could see boys sprawled on the ground of a room cloaked in black. Talking, cutting things with scissors. Three of them were huddled around a plaster-made earth, painting it in.
I looked at the decorations on the wall where my friends were standing, and I smiled at the silly pictures of the newest dorm members dressed in traditional Mayan clothes. They were shirtless, covered in paint and with strange hair pieces and one of them even had a tiger pelt over his shoulder. False news headlines were photoshopped over them: Newsflash! End of the World? Mayans held as suspects..."
Irvin, handing over the brown tape, said to Tinashe, "This place is starting to look like a cave."
And then it all hit me. Southern American Indian peoples. Boys decorating things together. Caves with Glowing Doors. The end of the world.
Sounds like a story that I am just about to finish.
I was sitting in front of the genkan, trapped between the letter boxes, the old rusty-maroon couch, a pile of several hundred mismatched shoes. Two boys were on ladders, setting up curtains to block the red light in the front room from the black light in the next. This way, when people walked into the dorm, they could see the glowing Mayan bird on the floor with its fabulous beak pointing the way into the living room.
Through that door - framed by glowing green and orange and pink high-lighted designs, like relics of some native past - I could see boys sprawled on the ground of a room cloaked in black. Talking, cutting things with scissors. Three of them were huddled around a plaster-made earth, painting it in.
I looked at the decorations on the wall where my friends were standing, and I smiled at the silly pictures of the newest dorm members dressed in traditional Mayan clothes. They were shirtless, covered in paint and with strange hair pieces and one of them even had a tiger pelt over his shoulder. False news headlines were photoshopped over them: Newsflash! End of the World? Mayans held as suspects..."
Irvin, handing over the brown tape, said to Tinashe, "This place is starting to look like a cave."
And then it all hit me. Southern American Indian peoples. Boys decorating things together. Caves with Glowing Doors. The end of the world.
Sounds like a story that I am just about to finish.