Behind the Skin

It has been a full six months since the sky last cleared. The running television in an electronics store window warns of impending rain. Waxed protection garments against acidic downpours are sold cheap. With the government holding sole manufacturing and distribution rights, said raincoats and gumboots sell cheaper than napkins. A given, since napkins cost no less than twelve bucks a piece. With budget cuts and the mass production ban, the apparel industries have taken quite a hit. The cloth and ready-to-wear market is barely half of what it used to be in 2020. Fashion houses took the hint and moved out, along with Tupperware and chemical dyes. The hero of today is the digital media. Solar power is buried at the hands of a forever cloudy sky, and the streets of New York have never been so grey. As of late, tucked in a corner of Brooklyn’s Sheepshead bay they’ve been black. A door opens and a pair of dark Nikes tread the gravely road. They move briskly and the door swings shut behind them. It opens again in all of five seconds, followed by the call of a name. The pair of feet stepping out of the house are younger, clad in dirty white converse and patched up shorts. The rustle of a bagpack and loud footfalls on the broken path, trying to catch up with the former. They race through the street, passing a corner. A child’s voice calling, “Dan! Dan, wait up!” It is easy to blend in with the landscape when it’s mostly monochrome. Leaning beside a dumpster, the scowl is hidden by his bangs, a shadow on his face as he waits for the pursuer to pass him by. The wall he chose for cover is mostly black due to charcoal collecting from regular pit fires. A homeless grandfather sitting by his feet tries striking a conversation and is duly ignored. A moment passes before he removes his hands from the pockets of his black denim, pulling up the headphones around his neck and placing them over his ears. With the press of a button, life is reduced to white noise and all there is to hear is the blast of rock metal. The only good thing in this hell. He pushes off the wall, straightens the straps of bag pack and heads to school. School is another hell. Half the teachers give him s**t for his hair and his personality while the other half ignore him completely. The students though are a different case. The morning assembly is already over by the time he makes it to the downtrodden but well-maintained heap of bricks they call an educational institution. He slips quietly into class and takes his usual seat at the back. The routine is a simple one. Lectures begin and end as monotonous as ever and he looks out the window the whole time. Sometimes, when the teacher is too bothersome he takes his attention and places it in his lap instead. Other times he doodles the teacher’s horrible death on the back of his notes. Doesn’t bother to make eye contact. Definitely doesn’t remove his headphones. When recess comes he sits by himself in the shadowy part of the field. Brushes off all attempts made by his step-brother to share lunch or worse, engage in conversation. His step-brother is a golden haired porcelain skinned eleven year-old with blue eyes who everybody calls Ren. Bratis doesn’t call him anything. Doesn’t even want to be called anything in return. His name is Bratis Daniel Reed, but it would be dope if nobody bothered to acknowledge him, really. “Dan!” A mop of golden hair appears in his periphery and he swallows a curse. “Here”, the annoying voice continues, a lunchbox appearing in his vision, “you forgot lunch” Bratis stands and starts to leave, deliberately ignoring the shorter boy. A hand grabs on to his sleeve, tugging. “Dan-” “Shut. Up”, he grits through his teeth, jerking his hand away. Finally he turns to the boy, rage evident in his eyes. In a low tempo, he speaks, “call me Dan one more time…”, and leaves the threat unfinished. He shoves at the boy’s chest hard enough to make him tumble back a few steps. He has enough of a hard time tolerating Ren at home. He doesn’t need this in school too. He doesn’t look back when he walks away, but he hears the murmurs. Children talking among themselves, gossiping about the weird kid in school. The kid whose a year back and fails half his classes. Whose complete face nobody has ever seen. Does he hide a scar under those bangs? Better stay away from him. Didn’t you hear his father’s a prominent member of the tabernacle? He hears them all. Doesn’t really give a s**t. Except for the words of two kids from class eight B. A fourteen year old latin girl and her cousin. Was her name Melissa? Or perhaps it was Melanie, he doesn’t really care. But she has curly dark hair and weighs a ton and get’s on his nerves. She carries around a camera and snaps his pictures when she thinks he’s not looking. Her cousin wears glasses and giggles whenever they pass in the corridor. Almost as if she has some sort of twisted crush on the mysterious boy in school. Or perhaps she’s just interested in him for friendship. Bratis doesn’t like people. And he absolutely hates those who try to be his friends. The girls are bad enough from afar, but when the glasses one watches his interaction with Ren and then rapidly scribbles in a notepad, he sees red. But the headmaster appears in a window and he tries to control the violent scenarios rampant in his brain. He ducks his head so his bangs cover his expression and keeps walking. In this school, he is more of an outcast than a delinquent. He cuts the rest of his classes, slipping out of campus before break time is over. Bratis is a boy of nineteen years who doesn’t believe in the education system, the government system and just the solar system in general. He was perhaps ten when he lost the one good thing in life, and has only seen the world in shades of blacks and greys ever since then. He pulls up the hood of his jacket so it falls over his eyes and places his headphones over them. There now exist micro pods you can stick in your ears that are more obscure than airpods, but that’s not the point. He’d rather people knew he didn’t want to interact with them. He presses play on his cellphone and slipping his hands in his pockets, begins to walk. The streets are dusty and riddled with potholes. Traffic is sparse because it’s the middle of the day and the automobile industry had taken a hit due to scarcity of fuel. Public transport is the only legal way of getting around aside from electric cars which don’t happen to be affordable by commoners. Public transport itself is expensive so most people just prefer to walk. It takes more than twice the time to get anywhere but it’s what’s become of life on earth. A high pitched ‘nobody cares’ blasts through his headphones and he nods along to the music. The distance between home and school is roughly thirty five minutes by foot, but he’s not going there. Not until later, that is. It’s not like it’s a home anyway; it stopped being one nine years ago. But he has never else to go back to. Walking aimlessly through the streets watching a wounded dog nosing through littered trash, he wonders if anyone will miss him if he doesn’t come back at all. Maybe his dad will. But then again, he brought in another woman to replace his mom so he’s not sure. His lips twist with the bitterness of it all. He raises the volume on his handset and keeps walking. There’s a sparrow sitting on the electric lines hanging overhead. He wonders how it must’ve survived and why it was perched so closed to it’s cause of death. Thinks that he relates. The electric lines are hanging too low to be safe. There was a kid that died a fortnight ago in this place due to electric shock when it had rained. Irregular and unseasonal rains have been a think since a decade ago. He stares at the cloudy sky, wondering if the skies would choose to open up right this moment. Maybe it would rain tomorrow while going to school. Maybe Ren would step on an unearthed wire. He keeps walking. Unintentional steps bring him to an a unmaintained cemetery. It’s not like he could’ve avoided it since it was smack in the middle of the city but still. But still… The name Lillian Reed stares up at him from a sparsely decorated grave marker. And all the music fades into white noise, leaving behind a deafening silence and the memory of warm hands.