Under the Sun of Tropical Skies

Trudging through the thick snow, he could feel his fingers slowly going numb, the flakes that descended upon his neck sending a chilly jolt down his back, making him think of ghosts that lurked in the trees. Or so he had believed as a child. Well, they did need places to live in, why not trees? A flickering vision of a little girl in a white dress, dead long before she deserved it, swinging her legs while sitting on one of the high branches of an oak tree floated by. The smoke from his cigarette curled skywards and he gazed towards the shining clump of lights within the warmth of the library.

He was sitting at the park bench by the vent, and so didn't feel as cold as while walking. The snowflakes shimmered as they fell upon the cold, hard ground. He had begun writing again, only mediocre prose, occasional poetry, a stab at haiku when he'd had a drink or two. What was there to write about though? The words that he spewed out once in a while were nothing more than angst-ridden lines that disguised themselves behind the mask of metaphors and attempts at being insightful. When had he last written something that he could show to another, hoping for empty words of praise? Better not even think about writing he muttered to himself, puffing away on his cigarette.
So he told himself a story, the only story he knew how to tell, changing a few names to not bore himself again:

The sycamore tree was silhouetted against the light of the evening sky, orange and maudlin, evoking emotions of wasted evenings amongst young adults who treated the world with boredom before they could head on and find a new one for themselves, was fearful to the eyes of the small boy as he walked homewards with a stick in his hand. The slayer of dragons, conqueror of lands unknown, betrothed now to several princesses, was humbly heading home to a dinner dutifully cooked by mother. Had he existed in the real world the stick in his hand would have been replaced by a technological monster of illimitable proportions, the sycamore only a decoration within a world of unknown mysteries; but here he trudged on within his imagination and found himself staring at the dark silhouette that captured every bit of his unlearned imagination.
As he stood with big blue eyes, staring at a branch swaying gently in the evening breeze, as the sky behind it turned from a secret shade of orange to a blur of pinks descending into a sliver of black that blanketed the horizon with defiance and refused to let any mortal eye make out any shape within its cloaking presence, he could see a figure, dangling its legs with reckless abandon.
Mother had already lain dinner on the table as the clock struck seven. Father was away and would not be back till Thursday – the house was so much quieter without him, even when he spent most of his day at the office. The floorboards and the roof-beams creaked as tough to give her company while she moved about her chores. As the water from the kitchen faucet drifted off the saucers, the door expanded to push the hinges back into place, and the clock’s ticking became oppressive to her dulled eardrums while the stars made their way across the sky.
Within her room (it hardly belonged to Peter with him being away so often), she would try to find solace in a book or in some obscure album that she had purchased at the store, but to no avail. The fluorescent lights. They beat down on her with unrelenting pressure, their harsh whiteness forcing her to cower away from their starkness into hidden corners within their apartment. This wasn’t the life she imagined once Peter had agreed to their transfer to a new city.
In Grantsville, they had a house hidden from the rest of the town. Yet Kassia had found ways to engage herself with the goings-on of local life. The afternoons would be filled with unending games of rummy and with talk of Cecilia’s latest trysts with local lovers. And here in the suburbs she seemed to be hemmed in by the way the lights surfaced wherever she turned her large, round eyes. Green as they were, they could not find respite from the probing of the rest of this fast-paced world. Where could she even try to go at this hour, where could she find a moment to reflect on her life without the lights beating down on her, making her feel guilty about everything she did? Why wouldn’t Sullivan come home to dinner? That boy was always off, wandering in within the parks that surrounded their simple, grey flats in the suburbs.
Dinner was the last thing on Sullivan’s mind. There was someone on the branch, a tiny figure, swinging its legs in a constant tick-tock like a clock out of a psychotic horror writer’s horrible nightmares. His eyes wouldn’t stir from that spot; they lingered there till they were stuck to the spot with such force that his stare wouldn’t even waver for a second to take respite from the darkness that the branch seemed to attract and focus on the beautiful colours that the horizon kept sucking into itself minute by minute.
It was a girl, a tiny girl in a white frock, who kept swinging her little legs to mesmerise Sullivan into a trance that made him forget Mother’s wait for her son to return home and spare her the torture devised by the lights filling her house. And the little girl kept peeping into her tiny palm, a palm, Sullivan knew, that was as tiny as she and as white as a snow flake that descended upon her creator as he puffed at his tiny stick of addiction.
Sullivan could never keep himself from giving in to his curiosity and spurred on by this vision of mystery he skilfully scampered up the branches to plant himself close to the little girl up above the world. With an oddly eerie mix of negative presentiment Sullivan forced himself to speak to this sprite of dusk: “What are you holding in your hand, little girl?”
Years later he would rue asking that question as her piercing green eyes bored into his; as her head turned to the right, the swish of her silken hair brushing against the leaves that crowned her head, he realised that Kassia’s eyes had lost him once and for all. A sinister chill up his spine forced him to shudder, to give in to the absence of any known emotion that might tell him how to react to her adult-like beauty.
Without a word she handed it to him, a stone of green and blue hues, maybe yellow and red, certainly with streaks of silver in it, nothing like anything he’d seen before. He was afraid to hold it; so evil, so full of unknown sin, of power denied to children. He knew he shouldn’t touch it. And so he clasped it within his right hand, feeling all her coldness spreading through his body, spreading through his shoulders, through his torso, and through his thighs.

“Hey! What are you doing here?” she asked. He looked up but couldn’t say a thing. Broken from his reverie, he smiled at her as she approached him with an unlit cigarette and asked for a light. "How was work?" she asked, and he nodded incomprehensibly in acknowledgement. “It was fine,” he managed in a few seconds. She sat down by him and shuddered as the chill in her bones was replaced with the warmth of the vent’s steamy vapours.

Femmetje’s green eyes shone under the moon. Her fragile fingers twisted around the cigarette as she raised it to her lips and inhaled deeply, pursing her lips as she did. The smoke lingered around them as the uneasiness created by months of tense love decided to envelope their shoulders suddenly. He hadn’t a word to say to her and was still recovering from his foray into the world of storytelling.

“How did your paper go?” she asked, trying to find a way to break apart the wall he kept building between them. He shrugged and flicked the long stem of ash sticking to the end of his cigarette. A few flakes drifted upwards, fighting against the snow that pushed into his world. The orange glow of the cigarettes teamed up to displace the kaleidoscope of colours that were a gift of the sycamore tree.