Can't say the words, no dreams, no songs, nothing is wrong

Ethan Switch - Friday, 21 May 2010 - 23:47:30 - print it raw

"Fish, good. Number one! You eat the super!" said the young boy. Holding up a ticket and throwing it away. He drags his left leg over to our table and reaches up to put the plate down. One fish head and a dipping bowl of fish sauce, cut chilli bleeding its seeds into the cloudy liquid. "Enjoy, you like!" he smiles as he disappears back into the kitchen and to serve another table.

We never see him again. "Him gone," as they say in the local broken English.

And so were we.

Done with the town. Done with the missing and the constant hissing. A shackle of shanties along the river. Three hundred and change, and we were very much done with having to fondle ourselves each and every time we needed to use money. You don't know what you're scratching from when you're all cashed up and humidity is on a constant rise.

Foreigners in a foreign land, butchering all with our foreign tongues. Green and with Lonely Planet eyes, walking around in an aphasic state of mind. Never quite getting the hang of it, never quite letting it go.

race for the prize or run him down

Getting by breaking, barely, as much as they were breaking ours. And for the... but what happens, it's forgetful. You find a map, you get lost. You walk north only to find the sun is right on your back.

The map said to turn left, or right. Couldn't really tell. There wasn't a frame and the words embroider and spine the landmarks. Of which there were many, and far from notable. A morass of brown and tan. It might have been a placemat in retrospect.

We did not expect to see the young boy again. And we didn't. We only saw the rest of his body, tripping over that leg of his. Clubbing him since birth, you couldn't not know it was him. It was.

Looking around, nobody cared. Nobody bothered to bother themselves. Another day. Just another day. Dissymmetry patching up a fine work for the alignment.

There was one man though, looking, staring, at us.

The way he smoked, dangling that cigarette from his pinkie and his ring finger with an artist's casual flair. We had seen it before. But he wasn't Indonesian. So we hadn't seen him before.