Coal Dust In The Wind [Charade]

“Has anyone told his mother?”

A woman was yapping on about something, standing by a display of expensive fruits and nervously glancing back and forth between her stubby friend and the boy who was rigidly sitting in the dirt.

Every week day, without fail, Yarrow Galax sat down in the middle of the square and stared at some fixed point a few inches in front of his nose. And there, every day, the women would gossip, and gossip, and gossip some more, and sometimes they would even work a little. Supposedly they owned a little shop where they made good money. At least, everyone figured as much, because they were both kind of lumpy in their clothes and their thick legs always poked too much out of their dresses when they walked.

”I’m sure someone has – but he’s not exactly breaking the law, is he? And he doesn’t hurt anybody just by sitting there.”

”He hurts the business! Nobody wants to buy apples when he’s sitting there ogling everyone that walks by.”

”Ogling isn’t the right word – he’s just kinda staring at nothing. See, he’s not even looking at us. He – “

He looked.

And he smiled, because one of the lady’s eyes went all wide and the other even let out a tiny gasp and turned away. And then they shut up after that, leaving him to his silence and his staring and his sitting. Occasionally he would pluck a pencil from his ratty shoulder bag and would turn his attention to the dirt, but if he drew anything interesting there, nobody was close enough to look. All they ever did was shoot glances his way, short glimpses that displayed their curiosity – or, more likely, their judgment – as he doodled on the ground in front of his sneakers.

He didn’t always draw. Sometimes he just stared straight ahead; sometimes he closed his eyes and slept there. He even started making snowballs one Friday last winter after a storm had come through, but he didn’t throw them at anybody. He just left them there at the end of the day, a monument to note his presence, gone when he came trekking through next morning. Yeah, nobody appreciated the snowballs – supposedly, a group of acne-covered preteens had taken the liberty of lobbing them at everyone who walked by that night after Yarrow left. He didn’t really see the harm in it; they probably would have terrorized people anyways, with all that snow everywhere. Better he supply them with ammunition than to be the target of an icy attack later on. Plus, no harm done, right? District Twelve, Yarrow, everyone – they all needed a bit of fun.

Only on this day, the ground was dry and dusty and weedy flowers were peeking out from the cracks of dried mud, the remnants of a rainstorm already past. He had to be thankful for the sunshine; some days weren’t nearly so perfect. The weather didn’t matter: he would come to that very same spot, day in and day out, be it a day of torrential rain or unrelenting heat.

And he would sit, and he would just be.