Speck

We tugged at our kites. We had made them ourselves, collecting spare change we found on streets and saving the coins in a porcelain pig, whose plastic underbelly snap we undid to buy all the necessary materials. We had shaved wood for the cross spars, cut tissue paper, and fastened the line to wooden spools. We now grappled with the spools as the line unwound, meters of line laced with sharp glass particles uncoiling against the lift and drag of the tropical wind currents.

At twilight, we flew our kites while the adults leaped off buses still in motion and strolled over to the local bar to spend their salaries on chilled Skols. Their guffaws reached us around the corner as they leaned over the concrete counter on swiveling stools. We flew our kites as the guffaws became hiccups and burps and muffled chatter.

We maneuvered our kites against the jutting rebars and the tangled cable wires by flicking our wrists. Most of our kites catapulted to the gutter at a gust of wind sweeping down the dirt street, scattering leaves and wrappers. A series of curses and sighs bounced off the caricature of Dilma Rousseff spray-painted on the opposite wall as we kids slapped our thighs in frustration. 

Most kites catapulted to the gutter, not all kites. They thronged around me, around the last kite still in the sky that day, yelling out a medley of instructions to swerve to the right, yeah swerve to the right, to dip low, no swerve to the left. They nudged me in the ribs, tussled my curls. They ran up and down and around me, squinting at the setting sun and pulling on my Corinthians visor, licking their fingers and holding them up to measure the wind’s direction, pit stains on their t-shirts.

They sneered at each other as they stood behind me, their shadows stretching out on the ground ahead of me. “Caramba, Juninho, tu ta uma fera hoje!” one of them mockingly praised me as he pointed to the kite overhead, over all our heads. He had the habit of using the archaic “tu” instead of the colloquial “você” in conversations, although he either didn’t know or ignored proper pronoun-verb conjugation. My hands cramped but I kept my eyes focused on the colorful rhombus in the sky. Another one of them stepped up next to me, pupils darting from spool along the line to kite, chewing a wad of tutti frutti gum as drops of spit spattered onto my cheeks. I didn’t want my grip to slacken by wiping them off, so his saliva dried like freckles on my face.

The first rock hit my shin, making a dent in the skin where a trickle of blood oozed out, matting the hair. It was hurled by one of them, from among the branches of the jatobá tree he had climbed onto. There was a silence, sneers suspended in an emptiness of space and time, and I wanted to yell, if only to make sure that I was there. Then a pellet of rocks from all sides of me, hitting me on all sides. The last rock, a triangular chip off the sidewalk, hit me on the back of my neck. As I keeled over, the kite drifted into the air, carried by the wind onto some community park, into some gated backyard or rooftop, a speck in the sky.

Reviews

[Jenig]

In such a short story, I was compelled to continue with each paragraph. For a story simply about flying a kite, there was a lot of imagery. I like the description of the bar-goers and their noises, and I was surprised by a sense of anticipation as the kids who lost their kites targeted the one that was left. It turned out to be more of a metaphor for many instances in life. I like how this read. There's a beginning, middle and end. I'm not left hanging, there's closure as the kite flies off. Great job.