Separate Universe

Razi 1

"Hey, Razi..." the hazy voice swirled daintily in his mind, pinpricking his senses into life and gently leading him away from the blissful darkness of a drowsily peaceful sleep.

"Razi." It said again, harder now. He could lightly feel poking sharp stones digging into his face. 

" 'ey boy, get up!" His eyes shot open, and he leapt to his feet as instinctively as if a button had been pressed. He was buffeted by a flowing onslaught of moving faces and vehicles, all shooting in different directions along the bustling lane. They were all so focused upon their small, private missions.

Except for one. One had its eyes scrunched into orbs of disgust. But he only saw them for an instant before a large plate of a hand thwacked him to the side, away from the sack of flour to which his head had peacefully been resting upon. 

His black haired head glanced quickly at his temporary bed, before running into the masses of crowds, hiding in its anonymity and far away from the other survivor. 

His bare feet padded speedily across the rough uneven flooring, whirling and darting through the eternal Pandora's Box like a blowing speck of dust through the turbulent effervescent mass of humanity. Every other 10  seconds, he was having to leap out of the way of a moving cart or avoid the whip of a protective salesperson selling their colourful scraps upon the open market that decorated most of the main streets. 

Thirty minutes later, he was still running, the same speed, and in the same direction, along the same road. He knew the path all too well. 

A small stream of brown, flowed alongside him, originating from one of the local rivers that wound its way through the Slum of Washti. His feet crashed to a stop beside it before he quickly lapped up the water  into his mouth in eight rapid strokes. Afterward, he shook dry his hands which were caked with a thousand days of grime. Originally, his hands were an olive colour,but now they were charcoal black. 

But that never bothered him. He was back to sprinting across what now were more refined tiles, which were cleaner and more smooth to the touch. 

Razi, head up high, was now looking for the bent misshapen roof that identified the Workshop. 

Razi didn't really understand why the Workshop existed. The things created there were brightly coloured and seemed to be made to fit around a human, not that anything cultivated beneath the machinery of the Workshop was ever seen inside the valley of the slum. Or at least, not covered by a layer of mud. Every finished product there was whisked away, never ever to be seen again. 

All he understood was his duty: cleaning any imperfections and markings on the machinery, and picking away dirt and random unused pieces of scraps. If the tools and materials were not clean by his dirty hands, the Sir would beat him. His arms, legs and stomach were littered with red strips, each appearing like a mini river of tears. On those days, the Sir would not give him any food either. Many days turned out that way. 

Nonetheless, Razi had no option but to work there. No one else would give him  two meals each day, even if it wasn't guaranteed. It had been this way for so, so long.

As he scurried through the splintered wooden frames of the doorway beneath the bent roof, his hearing was bombarded with a series of gunfire of whirring machinery. Looking around, he could see the typical army of workers engaged in a active mixture of arduous tasks. All were young, females, in the adolescent period of their life, and all shared a mixture of boredom and concentration at the focus they needed towards their extensive, tedious tasks. There was no talking but for the twisted shrieking of the engines  that never stopped crying out the hordes of the brightly diverse materials. 

He kept low, protecting his invisibility, not wanting to be the target of any angry supervising men who had decided to cover their hunger by taking a swig of hard alcohol. Still, he kept glancing around. But it wasn't because he liked watching the dyeing, embroidering and smocking going on around him in every direction. 

Rina was the aim of his sights: his fellow Cleaner. Hopefully she would have found where the rags they used to clean had been tossed carelessly at the end of each day. 

Suddenly he caught a pair bright, mischievous eyes; dark stars that were burning into him. He turned towards her, hurriedly edging through the gaps in the sharp edges of the machines. All the meagrely paid workers were oblivious to his passing, and probably wouldn't have stirred if he managed to impale himself on any of the protruding spikes that stuck out like swords, desperate to inflict an accident. 

She smiled briefly at his approach, sparkling teeth temporarily lighting up her face as if a torch was being flickered on and off. 

But then, suddenly, she coughed. Wracking heaves brutally punching themselves out of her throat. Her body ricocheted back and forth through each upheaval. She was being beaten up like a ragdoll as Riza took closer and closer steps before eventually crashing to a halt. She lifted up her head before a pool of saliva dripped onto the ground.

Razi half-smiled sheepishly, unsure what to do. 

But his bright smile burst into regularity at the sight of two scrubbing rags already wet and rinsed with the weird-smelling stuff he didn't know about that was used to clean. 

Having one in each midnight black  hand, she reached out an arm and gave him the larger rag. 

His smile growing, they nodded at each other, knowing what to do habitually the same way one would know a paragraph when reciting it each day for the whole of their lives. Jumping into action, they began another day. A long, hard day. But that didn't matter to them. It was all they had ever known. And, as a plus.... of course, they had each other.