Kindred: The Man With No Name

Shane

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The Harbor is a riot of color, lined in parts with bright red buildings, yellow brothels, and blue cobbled pathways. It is a place of unrestrained joy. The air rife with excitement.

For as long as I can remember, the people have always been celebrating something- flooding the streets in droves, all in the name of paying homage to one god or the other. Here, unburdened by the restrictions that colonies wrought, they were free to worship whomever they pleased. Much to my dismay, we are swarmed by a sea of white and gold- my mother's colors, as soon as we step unto the square.

Wherever I look there are painted faces and masks- Erik and I weave through them, venturing past a series of narrowly wound streets. They are plagued with her banners- they hung across storefronts and poles stacked up alongside the road. As with all the other festivals, it is loud, so loud in fact that we had given up on our conversation.

Market stalls spill onto the streets, and they coat the air with varying scents, all ranging from mind clouding perfumes to dried fish. Eager vendors clamor around us, shoving their products in our faces, but disperse soon after at the hint of our indifference.

One persistent vendor, however, leaves his stall unattended and sticks to us like glue, committed to remaining a nuisance until we buy one of the bone necklaces that hung from his neck. I shove a few coins into his hands, pick the most flamboyant one I can find and drape it around Erik's neck.

He scowls at me but waits until the vendor is back at his stall before ripping it from his neck. The music grows louder with each step we take. It isn't symphony, yet there is an intricate detail about the rhythm as the drums come together in tandem.

A little girl in a flowery dress runs right through Erik. I catch her before she hits the ground but I am not fast enough to stop the contents of her basket scattering all around. Erik falls to her side as she kneels to gather her beautiful yellow daisies, and together, they retrieve them twice as fast.

He holds up the last two.

"How much?" he mouths.

She says something, but her words are drowned in the noise. I pull my money bag from the strap on my vest and dump the entirety of its contents in her basket. She stares at me blankly. Her confusion turns into dread as she finds my eyes for the first time.

"I won't hurt you" I sigh, but she lifts her basket off the ground and scurries away as fast as her little legs could carry her.

I offer Erik a hand as he gets back to his feet. In turn, he sets both flowers in my hand. I love daisies. They were daringly simple, with an unapologetic stubbornness matched only by their beauty. They blossomed where they were not supposed to, proudly gleaming under the sun.

But they would not survive the journey. I hold them up to my face, inhaling deeply before I let them slip through my fingers.

The music dwindles rapidly as we venture deeper into the heart of the Harbor. 

We take another turn and soon the noise is swallowed up by an unnatural stillness that hangs in the air, casting an eerie sense of foreboding.

This part of town is almost completely closed off- most of the buildings we pass are boarded up, and we scarcely come across anyone as we make our way towards the structure at the very end of the street. We stop right at the foot of the entrance. Regardless of how many times we come here, I will never get used to how completely out of place it always looked. The front half of the store is made up of old plywood that must have seen better days. It was held up at the sides by dark concrete bricks. The windows are old, mostly blacked out. There were no words, pictures or even signs engraved on them. Erik pulls back the equally beaten, weathered door and I take a tentative step forward...