Had he wanted to romanticise, or to dramatise, he would have decided that the dreams woke him, but he knew it to be untrue.  He woke to the hot, pervasive sun, to the taste of gravel and its numbed imprint upon his face; to the acrid smell of stale urine, and the sound of the passing crowds.  For a moment he lay, though unaware that he lay on the ground, his slow mind stuck in the warmed cushion of sleep.  He tasted blood and instinct took over, hand moving to his face.  A sneeze peppered his fingers with scarlet globules, and he almost began to remember.

The boy – with the age but none of the hard edges of a man – gradually wrenched himself into a sitting position, rested against a skip and looked around.  A dirty alleyway was the stage for this, his latest escapade, its bricks fluffy even in the pained heat of mid July.  He pulled his jacket tight around him and lifted the hood onto his head, shivering quite fervently in spite of the uncomfortable warmth around him.  The sweat stung his eyes and his wounded body.  He spat more blood, wiping with his sleeve a face to which he still could not assign a name.  The boy searched his pockets, finding a half-smoked packet of cigarettes, a handful of loose change, but no wallet.  No identification of any kind.  Cold panic squeezed his throat.  He took a cigarette from the pack and a red disposable lighter, the first drag rushing straight to his brain.  Dizzied, he searched for an answer. Read More→