Those Kids

He didn’t like the look of them. They crossed the road right into his path and spat globs of fluid flat into the street. Swaggering slow and clustered, they flicked chins over shoulders to grab sturdy glances back at him. They were very obviously together, uniformed in unfit sport suits and the first three numbers from the barber’s catalogue, and yet they are climbing the pavement spaced and separate. Shaved sides duck as one stops to examine an artefact on the ground, left a few steps behind in the wake of rustling polyester. A coin, or maybe a wasteful butt still tall enough to re-light? Worry strikes and he slows to a shuffle, not wanting to catch up with this kid and become surrounded as he passes. He doesn’t think they will try anything, but if they were to, this is the empty section of the street they’d do it. This is a channel through the centre of advanced civilisation, and yet his thoughts become primitive ones. They all look to be occupying that age that unnerves him, that age where alone there is little danger, but in numbers their threat accumulates and their intelligence does not. The age where they would probably try to kick rather than punch, an age where if he grabbed a leg as it flew at him, he could use it to throw a vicious kid across the pavement. Or more usefully, he could use the kick’s opening to smash his own shoe into the vulnerable crotch of someone only just old enough to understand what it means to hurt the way it would. The tracksuit bottoms would offer no protection and the first maggot would crumple and stay down.

His blood pumps and his fists tighten as he feels a surge swallow him. He is a pulsing organ of animal, bracing to squish and be squished. A pummelling circuit that fires without asking as his eyes dilate. But as the moments start to drag on his oversized shape, it doesn’t happen. He remains in the air un-squished. It still isn’t out of the question, but the breath comes back and his hyperfocus begins to erode and cave in on itself. The awkward muscle falls away leaving only the skeletal silhouette of his humanity, and he thinks for an exhaling second that maybe his assumptions were too harsh. They hold themselves intimidatingly and arrogantly, purposefully stripping away anything goofy and naive from their image. But perhaps, behind that facade there could be an insecure kid, trying to fit in by dragging themselves up out of their own childhood. Maybe whatever was on the ground momentarily cracked their expression and a sense of wonder breathed for just a second. Maybe it wasn’t money or trash, maybe it was a cool insect? Or a weird-shaped stick? Or a single unguarded frame of childlike curiosity from a kid forgetting not to be?