streetlamp

My sister and I were walking home in the dark, coming from the worser side of town.

We had stopped at the gas station and got coffee. This was not because we did not have coffee at home, or because the coffee from the gas station was appealing in the slightest, but just because we like the walk. The cracked gray asphalt, the barking one-eyed dogs, the drooping sunflowers and rich sunset on our backs. Dusk settled before we even realized it.

Then it was just dark.

Televisions hummed. The paper sleeves warmed our hands in the summer night air. I zipped up my hoodie and stuffed a hand in my pocket, trying to make my shadow as big as possible, and failing pretty badly. My sister did not seem to notice either where she was or who she was. I am not even sure she knew where she was going. I watched her shadow wander like a drunken ghost behind me.

I worried.

In the light of a streetlamp in front of us, a parked car sat sentry over a group of neighborhood children. Neighborhood children, in their grasp of the greatly familial pack mentality, have no concept of age. Teenagers still with toddlers, all together, all playing the same games in the dark.

The younger ones giggle and shout in the distance, broken bits of spanish bouncing off the cars. They tickle and wrestle and ride tiny bicycles around each other, tumbling over and laughing and crying. They skip stones across the road as if it were an endless black lake.

The cars cannot touch them.

A boy and a girl, older than the others but not old enough, leaned against the car like the paperback cover of a really bad novel. The cheap romance kind that thrift stores crawl with. The kind that make you wonder if literature and graphic design were things people ever even went to college for.

The boy folded his thick arms over his thick chest, a shiver blowing through his striped blue shirt. The girl, arm around his, ankles crossed, leaned against the door of the second-hand civic like she was selling it. She gazed up at his crooked-toothed grin like he was the sun, moon, and all the stars which we could not see.

She laughed like something that makes you want to cringe. She laughed like sixth grade lunches, and crickets under your bed. As I passed, we regarded each other with the caution of strangers in the dark, and for a moment I forgot that I was no officer and no one's mother.

The girl and boy looked at me, as embarrassed as mismatched socks under a suit.

But you are only children... The thought settled in the street before I could help it. The girl fidgeted uncomfortably, and the boy looked at his feet. I forced myself to smile an apology, for they were only playing pretend.

A chubby young boy of about six started talking to my dog, and smiled up at me, streetlight warm and bright upon his face. He asked if he could pet her. "Of course," I said. Then, under my breath, somehow embarrassed that my sister might hear me, "Por supuesto. She won't bite you."

My dog wanted to be home. I motioned for her to come up to the boy, but she backed away, cowering into the dark. "Hey, it's okay," I told her.

"I'm sorry," I told the boy. "She's afraid of the dark."

I knelt down and held her steady, and the boy cautiously and gently moved a small, soft hand over her head. My dog is very soft, and children often ask to pet her. She is very good with kids most of the time. This was one of those times.

My sister was, by this time, in front of me, and wondering where I had gone. "Goodnight," I said to the boy, and waved to the unspecified space behind me.

"Goodnight," the kids called back.

I talked about the kids and the streetlight while lying in the grass with Charlotte and Sally a few days later, watching softball practice. It was one of the sleepy cloudy times in life when you don't have anywhere you'd rather be and no one you would rather be beside. These are the times I fill with telling badly constructed stories about beautiful moments, trying to piece the images together and put color and movement and meaning to them. But in the end it is not the image or the words that stick with you in that moment; it is the head on your chest and the hand in yours and the shoes all leaning against each other in a lazy tangle of affection, very much like the children against the car.

We, too, are only children in the dark, while the televisions hum, and it is only a matter of time before a child a few years older passes by and casts us a look of shame before we begin to question our place under the streetlamp.