Alrighty, so as of lately I have had a lot of writers block however there has been one thing that has been stuck in my mind. A piece that I have been working on to this day have consumed a lot of my time and I just wanted to share it here for a bit of feedback, this is only the first half of the piece, but I digress. Mostly if it is something that I think I can work with in the future.
The sound of piano tiles was the only thing that came to mind for Dmitri when he tried to think about his mother. It was the only thing that he could remember. At least until the ‘before nights,’ the before nights were the nights that were blurry for him, but nights that he remembered, nevertheless. They were the nights he would hide in dimly lit alleyways and the nights where the sleeves of his jacket would be littered with holes and scraps found from bistro dumpsters. The before days were the days spent ducking behind crowds and waiting for the sun to set, but most of all they were the days that Dmitri spent making sure he never had to go back to the home where he had lived before. Ever since the day that the flu had grasped its hands around Dmitri’s mother and refused to let go, Dmitri would not come back home. His mother was all that he had left, and for all he knew she still sat motionless in that same bed with a throat void of sound and skin void of color.
However, when it came to the before days, there was one day that stood out far beyond the confines of what people understood as a start. It was the day that would create Dmitri’s life. Shape it into the form of a being that sat behind an army of marble.
Dmitri did not know the name of the game that the men in the park were always playing, all he knew was the way that they sat in beholden of the way their opponents played always met his gaze. There was one man in particular who he would always find himself focused upon. It might have been due to the fact that there were always men that sat around him as he played, closely looking in on the games that he would play. However, Dmitri liked to think that it was because of the silver tooth that sat in his mouth that were already littered with crowded teeth. Every time that he would play, he would relentlessly lick at the silver tooth, as if he was trying to polish it bright enough to a point where it would distract the other player. But as Dmitri continued to watch the man play, he realized that it was instead his eyes that distracted the other player. Dmitri had always watched the games from afar, so he was never sure of what color the man’s eyes truly were, however, all he knew as that they were dark. At first, he was offput by the darkness, but with the cold nights spent huddled in dumpsters and under awnings, he had begun to find comfort in the impending darkness that were the nights of Moscow. Even when the streetlights finally cut off in the early hours of the morning Dmitri had realized he was no longer afraid, this was due to the fact that the lights had done nothing for him but block out the light of the stars. This was one of the few things that Dmitri had begun to find comfort in, this was due to the fact that no matter what happened on the harsh streets of a Soviet Jungle of concrete, no matter how many games the man one, no matter how many times the lights would flicker off, and no matter how many times mothers died, the stars in the sky would not go out, they would continue to shine every time that the streetlamps began to flicker.
January had turned to February, and to March soon after. A nine-year-old boy who stood behind alleyways to watch men play a game that he knew not the name of turned into a ten-year-old boy who would cower behind the crowds of people who walked the sidewalks, just so that he might be able to get a better look at the board. Even though the nights had begun to warm up, this did not make things easier for Dmitri. Nights spent easier outside did nothing but create more places for others to take the spots Dmitri would call home. “Dumpster Scum” he had heard one of the men at the park say one morning when a man Dmitri had recognized had crossed through the park.