I often watched the schoolchildren each morning as they trooped past my front garden. I would sit outside with my coffee and newspaper and enjoy the fact that everything was still so early, that I still had so much time. Of course, I was an old man then, and time had taken on a fractious quality, difficult to corral and parcel up like it used to be.
The children were well-fed and cheerful, passing through as they did from the more elite neighbourhoods that bordered my own. They would chatter excitedly like little birds, jumping up and down, spreading out their arms as they described their weekend activities. All except one, a sickly-looking girl that trailed some way behind the others. Always late.
It took me a while to realise she was holding something in her right hand every time she passed by. Where other children would have bags or folders in their grips, she seemed content to carry this sole object to school and back, which glinted an electric pink between the gaps of her fingers. I could not see it clearly.
I grew concerned, yet she never seemed to suffer at the hands of the other children despite her clear status as a loner or outcast. They kept a distance that was almost respectful, and more than once I saw them cast a glance behind at her, as if checking she was still with them, before their eyes would flick to the object in her hand and then away.
It was not my imagination that she began to watch me as I drank my morning coffee and enjoyed my temporary surplus of time. I knew what it was. She wanted to show me what she carried. Eventually, several weeks later, she broke away from her route on the pavement and walked onto my front garden.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“It’s for you. It told me you should have it now.”
She walked up to my deckchair and opened her hand, revealing what could only be described as a crude doll. A ball of fiberglass with five bolts driven into the mass, all dipped in a glossy electric pink lacquer. Her hand was chapped and blanched, as if she had been applying a great pressure to the object, and the blood did not return to her palm during our time together.
“Thank you,” I said. “But this is yours.”
Her face screwed up then. She looked like she was about to cry.
“No. Take it. It wants you to take it.”
She thrust it into my hand. I felt my fingers curl around it then, felt the bolts biting into my sagging skin. And that was that, for a while. Tighter and tighter I gripped, my bones shifting under the flesh, until all I could see between the tiny gap in my fingers was that splinter of electric pink.
Alexander James 