Orange

The Hidden
Tuesdays were always the same, in that they were normal. Rural, neat, organized suburbs, houses and hedges in neat lines on a Tuesday morning: wake up, open the door, retrieve the milk bottles, breakfast of toast and orange jelly and cold milk in a frosted old glass that needed replacing, run the paper route. At least some people could enjoy their Jamaasian law-decreed independence. Wake up, Poms, you'll be late. Get the milk, Poms, your mother can't do everything for you. Bring me my breakfast, Poms. You burnt the toast again, Poms. I never asked for orange jelly and you did it again, Poms.

Falltime: Wake up, open the door, retrieve the milk bottles, breakfast of especially burnt toast and orange jelly stuffed into a crumb-filled sack when hurrying was in order, sip of milk from the cold glass bottle before school. Your grades are terrible, Poms.

He much preferred the summertime. He could lose himself in the lack of things to do, lose himself other days in the repetition and routine whenever there were things to do. One of his friends called him boring. He didn't mind, didn't say anything about it anyway, because it was one of his only friends anyway and he didn't care for reconsidering routine, factoring in the changes that would come about, the rifts in his structure that would come about after the loss of a friendship just barely holding together on fraying thread, something that was once beloved not strong enough to withstand the passage of time and change.

Tuesday, summertime, morning, paper route. A boring job. Repetitive. Very good. It would have been so, anyway, if his transportation had not been stolen from his mother's house some time over the weekend. He did not tell his mother, because he would hear things he had heard before. Useless, hearing something you didn't care for again after you were well familiar with it. Deer aren't suited for paw-mammal jobs, Poms. You're taking their jobs, Poms. We're taking their jobs and I don't care about advancement this advancement that, you're better off doing something suited for the hooved kind, Poms.

He could do it just fine. With the minimal modifying devices necessary for operating the motorbike, he could aim, lean at the right angle, toss anything onto a doorstep with his teeth. But the hooveds, Poms. The hooveds. We're ruining this country, Poms. I sure do seem to hate myself and everyone who looks like me, Poms.

But he couldn't say anything about the bike, couldn't stand hearing her saying she was right. Intrusion, a cobbled, ruined Frankenstein of a perfectly good routine, hooves clunking on asphalt, the itch of the leather bag on his back. It itched. He trembled with a silent rage, it itched and now that was all he could think about.

He walked down the street, tossing rolled-up newspapers onto doorsteps, a jumbled jagged shattered feeling rattling about within him like a bag of broken glass.

Change. Unless it was technology for hooveds or his mother's nonexistent, miraculous turnaround, it was something Poms hated.

The leaves of autumn, yellow, red, orange, had begun to clutter the streets and fill the gutters. It was nice, orange leaves, the color orange. But it meant falltime and falltime meant drastic change into drastic routine, boxes, numbers, letters stamped on worthless cards. It was the only sort of routine Poms disliked, because it couldn't make up its mind, it was always changing on the inside too. And people. Only a few of them liked him. He clung to each kind gesture, the tiniest bits of flotsam drifting towards him as he struggled against wave after relentless wave, drowning in an ocean of everything he hated. Poms did not like to think about drowning.

As he passed another gutter, something caught his eye. A small, round thing, quivering in the sheaves of crisp brown leaves, shining like a particularly shiny... thing. It was a very shiny thing. Very, incredibly shining, shiny, very shiny, pearl, shining pearl-- where had he seen a pearl before? Shine. Sheen. Ssh-ell. Despite spiraling into the worthless but very fascinating and repetitive and obsessive wonderings again, Poms did not immediately notice the pearl-shining-thing slither like a very shiny pearl... no... shiny, not a shiny, a regular snake, slithering like a snake between the leaves and into the gutter. Poms gasped a small, disappointed gasp, as he was too busy thinking to pick it up when it had been in reach and was very much looking forward to doing so before it had disappeared.

He scowled. He would be late again. If it wasn't his mother it was someone else. Poms began to start down the street again when he noticed something else. The gutters in his town had openings above them on the side of the curb so that monsters or feral animals or demons or whatever could crawl inside, and now Poms saw a face. A face, obscured by darkness, two pits for eyes, holes jabbed into a rough wood. They stared at each other for a moment. It, the face, raised an arm, something like a hand, one of patchwork, jumbled multicolored skin and fingers clutching something shiny at the end of a rusty chain.

"Is that yours," Poms asked.

The thing made a strange sort of inquisitive noise in reply, paused, and responded, "Y...ou..urs?"

"No."

"No," it agreed, and tilted its head forward, dropping the shiny thing into some abyss below and making another odd noise before tittering to itself excitedly and raising its hand through again, clutching a leaf.

"Yours."

"No," Poms responded bluntly, shaking his head.

"N..o, no. No.. no. No, no," it insisted, pushing the leaf towards him.

Poms stared.

"Come out of the gutter. It's wet. What are you?"

The Amnesiac
WIP