Held (with Ropes and Pulleys), Pt. 1

6 kids and suburban hell. Photography by Greg Girard: warning: strong language

Get me out of here.

Grass lay parched in the summer sun beside the dirty pavement. The mercury reached past 30, and though it was a blue day the enveloping rays of sun seemed to tint the sky ever brighter, ever paler, at once more beautiful and more dangerous. It was midday now, and the turquoise sheen of the dawn, with it's moist, misty air, seemed completely alien in the blinding heat that now inhabited Anchor's Ridge.

Brian stood next to the doorway of the milk bar, the sweat of his lithe teenage frame sticking closely with the posters of $2 ice-creams and international calling cards behind him. Despite the milk bar's roof having more than enough shade for someone of his size and stature, Brian stood in the sun. It grazed his pale white flesh, freckles burning, red hair that seemed to look less and less Celtic and more in flames. He grit his teeth and waited it out.

It would be worth it, someday.

Alarm bells rang and the shop-owner, a middle-aged man of apparently Vietnamese descent, held on to his dear life. He remembers of when he was their age; when he would fly a kite out into rice paddies before the bombs fell, before the land suffocated, before the weight set in, before he grew, and grew tired.

The youths held the cash register. It was unusually composed of Ebony, and held it to be an antique register, not a cheaply-manufactured replica.

They didn't care.

"Where's the money, you c**t?"