You'll Never Sink //Calypso

I watch the people going by as if I have something to prove and am waiting for an appropriate target. Everything about my posture screams nonchalant, to the way my gangly but well-built frame is lounging against the wall, to the neutral expression on my face. My eyes are slightly narrowed and I rest against shadow, half of me in the crisp autumn sunlight, the rest coloured by the darkness. I crackle the knuckles of my right hand against the wall, the other grips the strap of the small canvas bag that rests on my shoulder. It is a cold morning, but I am sweating still from my jaunt across the rooftops, breath coming quick even as I try to quiet it.

I love to people watch, to see the land people walking around, moving. Some tend to trip on air, feet reaching for a wave that isn’t there and they fly, crashing into someone else only to create a domino effect. Others slip artfully around corners, feet working as their partners, taking them along easily. Some use the canals as their passage, those that never learned to walk on land, those much like me. Sometimes I will catch a ride on one of their gondolas, dropping lightly down from a bridge to offer them a crooked smile as payment. Sometimes I’ll get told to bugger off, those like The Ferry Man accept my intrusion with a nod.

Still, nothing is free, everything costs something. For passage I might pay with a dead seagull I managed to wrap my hands around when traversing the rooftops, though The Ferry Man usually prefers gossip. It is a specialty of mine, to catch the words that fly on the wind in this place. People don’t seem to notice me when I’m positioned as I am now, where they might huddle in the entrance of an alley to stay out of this autumn wind. One can learn a lot about the people living here just from what I do now. I never went to school, I can’t read the scrambled codes that they call words, but I can hear. They think I’m dumb because I dropped out of school, people waggle their tongues near me and I swallow their scraps like a mutt under the table. I know things that most people don’t.

It’s funny the things you learn in a place like this.

District Four, I mean. I’m a boy who was raised on water, and home has never meant land and leaves. Still, in the center of town, you learn stuff. A while ago, I learned that you shouldn’t steal bread. You might get caught and whipped to death. Heavy stuff like that, stuff you can’t learn in schools. I’m glad I never went back to school, the teacher liked to hit the back of my hands with her stupid ruler every time I spelt a word wrong, which was too often. Maybe if that guy hadn’t gone to school, had gotten a bit street smart instead, he would have known these things. Still, to every story, there is more than one side.

Everyone thinks that he was stealing it, that when the twin sister caught him, he was trying to rape her sister. Those of us who know where to listen know better. No one knows that it was a setup, that the twin sister’s jealousy sent a boy to his death. It’s a fairy tale, one I gave in scraps and pieces to the underworld to hear. I have power in this place, for even though I don’t look like anything but a fisherman’s son, a sheep who follows the styles of this District’s underworld to a ‘T’, I have my own intellect. Just because I don’t proudly show it off to any person who happens to walk by it doesn’t mean that I’m slow.

So you hear a lot out here in the sticks, and I’ll give the Landies that. Their surface is far too stagnant for my liking, but I’ve learned a lot of things on concrete that I couldn’t learn on the sea. Still, out here it smells too much of sulfur and smoke, not enough of salt and brine. I notice the smell in an uncomfortable way, it’s not overpowering but it is off putting.

Languorously, I push myself off the wall with the use of my shoulder blades and turn to climb up the brick wall behind me. My booted toes find the footholds that don’t seem to be there, and I pull myself up onto the roof. Crouched low, I run swift across the top of the roof, checking from side to side out of habit. It is just too early for the world that works beneath ours to still be awake. Dropping down once I have found a suitable place, I pull my bag open with a slow zip, revealing a couple aerosol cans of spray paint, a black hood, my regular clothes as opposed to my running gear, and a thermos of tea. My mother always insisted I take it so I didn’t spend my small earnings on a cup of coffee. I have told her time and time again that that isn’t what my money is spent on. She knows I blend all the tea in the many tins in the kitchen myself. I don’t know why she would think I would lower myself to drinking the muck the land dwellers call tea.

Shaking my head slightly, I get to work. It begins with the shutting of my eyes, a deep breath and then my hand picking a colour at random. I never decide what I draw, my hand does. It’s always different anyway, except for the eyeball. The scenes I paint are always in the iris of the eye, a black hole in the middle of each one. I don’t know why I do it like that, it’s just something that started, and like any tradition, it would be weird to tag something different. The space I’ve chosen is fairly out in the open, and therefore I have to work fast. It’s why I work in the early mornings, why I don a mask before I do. I’ve been tagging the same stuff for years, but I’m not ready to reveal myself yet and get myself a whipping of my own. I am not averse to pain, I have felt it many times. The man who goes searching for it however, is a strange man indeed.

The scene my hands paint today is that of hills that roll so high they tower over the tiny house that sits at the foot of one of them. The house is nothing but a speck in perspective to the mighty hills that shadows it. My pictures have never really had a political meaning, but it’s hard to not think of the proclamation that says only twelve to fourteen year olds will be reaped this year. I do not allow my hand to shake, I never allow the luxury of outward emotion, but I cannot help but think of my little brother with his weak little leg. I have spent a life time protecting his innocence. If they take him, I do not know what will happen. My insides recoil and shudder away from me at the idea. I shut my eyes, mid spray, searching for calm.

Whoa, I'm like the Dead Sea
The nicest words you ever said to me
Honey can't you see,
I was born to be,
be your Dead Sea