RAG DOLL: a toyish love story

1: Repairable Football

The sun was setting slowly acquiring a clear-cut shape of orange. No wonder a kid once in his childhood wanted to eat it considering it a ripened fruit, a mango.

Birds were flying off to their nests where they would get the surprise of new chirps echoing out from the cracked eggshells.

The sky was painted with splashes of vermilion over it. Street lights were left ON just two minutes back. Responsible municipality corporation!

Black and white lizards were coming out from their niche to crawl on the moss-stained wall like crocodiles or chameleons. He wandered where they lived in the daytime. Was there any lizard hole like mouse hole and rabbit hole? If there was any then he would not a bit hesitate to declare that as a haunted house.

He rested his chin on the base rim of the window, standing himself on a wooden stool so that his eight-year-old eyes could peek at the next window of the cottage facing its back to his house.

The unplastered house was hardly standing. The bricks of its skeleton slipped out from some places out of its position damaging the upper portion standing on its support. Old and new timbers of wild herbs, shrubs and even trees started growing outside escaping their route through the zigzag cracking on the wall.

That house never had any electric supply, at least never after his birth. He was seeing the same shattered architecture since his consciousness and only witnessed the breaking of its backbone over time.

A few minutes later the house would be completely dark. He was scared of the lizards in that house. Where they would go? Did they really don't have any home to stay... like her?

That house never had its window closed because there were no doors to close that. And he was thankful it didn't close so that he could make sure she didn't get afraid of anything.

Today he promised he would apologize to her. In the daytime, he was in school and in the evening his mother didn't let him roam in that direction but he had sworn on his math book that he would muster up bravery and ask her for friendship after the sorry.

He again looked up at the sky. Sun was gone now leaving its colorful shadows all over the sky. But ultimately it would be dark like theirs. Why his shadow was not that colourful? Which teacher should he ask the question that why his and his mother's shadow came in the same colour black when she was wearing pink and he was yellow yesterday? Art teacher or science teacher? Surely not to the math teacher.

He prayed to send her to the next window before that house turn dark and she would lost with the lizards.

Three days back he and his friend were playing football borrowing it from a common friend. But accidentally they kicked it inside a well. They tried to pick it up outside but the depth of that trashy well was four times the length of his body.

A few moments later after rushing here and there for any plan to rescue the ball he saw a plastic sack laying on the ground and he could mark the familiar thing they were searching for inside it. It was a muddy punctured football. He picked it up outside the sack and handed it to his friend. The ball was repairable so they could deliver it to the common friend after repairing it like he wouldn't mark up the damage.

His friend left earlier to arrange for repairs. He too was about to go but stopped seeing a little girl walking barefooted to the sack. Her hands were gripping one squeezed cold drink cane, chocolate wrappers and a few chips packet. She dumped it inside that sack.

Suddenly she started searching inside the sack, her entire body almost got invisible. She looked around. Quickly he hid himself behind a tree in fear of getting caught after thieving.