Mea's Story : The Day They Came

It was a cold creaky night. The wooden boards of the verandah sighed, as though stricken from a bad bout of gout.
Mea crouched on the steps of the small verandah, nursing a smoking cup of hot chocolate.
She could feel Little Bozo trying to get his sticky hands into her pocket .
‘Mea are you sleeping?'
Mariamma’s check chant bounced off the stone walls, every fifteen minutes. Closeted in her warm kitchen she talked to her rosary and her God.
Mea nudged Bozo.
‘Ssssh, or she will come checking'
Bozo inched closer to her, put a grubby finger on his lips and smiled at his elder sister.
Hand in sticky hand, the brother sister duo sat and looked for the gate at the end of the garden. The cold night fog had hidden it completely. Sometime soon , the gate would open. A flicker from a lit cigarette would pierce the fog. The cement walkway would dance with the music from mama’s clackers. Then the gate would go swing-click-shut and papa would cough.
That would be their signal to leap into bed.
The waited silently. They counted five Mariamma calls . The chocolate was licked clean from the tip cup, but the gate did not swing. Suddenly, as though called for another urgent appointment, the fog vanished, leaving behind a night with a thousand stars.
‘Mea shall we go up, to the roof of the world?’
‘We can’t, that wicked witch locks it every night and eats the key up.’
Bozo smiled beatifically, reached for his pocket and pulled out the misshaped bronze key.
‘Where did you get that from?’
‘When she kissed me goodnight, I took it from her neck.’
Mea , spontaneously reached forward to twist his deceitful little ear but Bozo was already running towards the stairs.
The roof of the old wooden house , was bare except for some cans of paint.
In the distance, the black night had swallowed the brown mountains, the river had turned silver and the fields lay bare, shorn of everything but small, silent paddy.
Bozo saw them first.
‘Look Mea , by the river , look.’
Shattering the stillness of the night , a herd of wild white horses came galloping.
Their manes flying in the air, their grunts echoing through the night like cymbals.
‘Mea, they exist, papa told me a story about them, but I didn’t believe him. Mea they are real.’
Bozo was leaping from one side of the roof to another. Mea stood transfixed.

The pack moved with a single rhythm, as though choreographed for some grand carnival.
Their hooves played the bass in the night air, leaving behind little whirlpools of white dust.
The young foals in the middle, the larger horses at the front and the rear.
They streaked across the cold valley , proud , free, fearless.

Suddenly the fog descended again and they moved into darkness.
That was the day, Mariamma’s God was very naughty.

Mea spent her entire life, searching for the beauty of that single moment. When she was twenty one, she announced to the world that she was a free spirit. Her life post this declaration, followed the psychedelic yellow brick road to innumerable rehabs. The one addiction she could not be cured of ,was her need to fornicate with men who resembled horses.

Bozo spent his life, searching for the divinity of that single moment. He joined several orders, missions, the Peace Corps. He was last seen vanishing into the mountains of Afghanistan, at the rear end of a straggly group of defeated Al Quaeda soldiers.

There is probably a reason why Mariamma’s God doesn’t share the raw beauty of the naked universe with little children. They don’t handle it very well, do they?