d.u.i » niall horan a.u (on hold atm)

s i x

The rest of the stale friday evening was quite unproductive, my talk with Niall being the only light to my day-

It's still weird calling him by his name, even though just the sound of it coming off of my lips makes thousands of catterpillars bust out of their cocoons in my stomach, their fluttering wings causing my body to erupt with goosebumps.

I was outside with my brother as the sun slowly made it's last goodbye's, sliding down the backs of the trees that were painted black from the sun's contrasting shadow against them. Sitting against the brick building, I watched as his little hands held the blue stick of chalk tightly, trying to write the first letter of his name."

"Sissy, how do you spell Dylan?" He asked, his high-pitched voice making his question linger with innocence. I smiled before crawling over to him, hovering my body over his while I grasped his hand, mine looking rather large in comparison to his.

"Well, What's the first letter?" I tried challenging the three year old.

"T, right Sissy?" His bright brown eyes looking up at me as he asked, uncertain about his answer. I laughed and shook my head, guiding his hand to draw the letter D."

"No, silly, it's D."

"Ohhh, D." He giggled, his smile brighter than the sun that was still grasping for life, however now lower behind the trees. "Kind of like a circle with a straight line, right?"

"Yep, just like that."

"Now how about the next letter?"

Instead of going through each letter, and explaining it's whole life story and structure with the kid, I just wrote his name out with the shortening stick of blue chalk above his writing for him to copy; he found it a lot more big-boyish anyways, so it was a win-win.

His small, pink tongue stuck out of his pressed lips as he carefully finished his last step of drawing the Y, smiling at himself at his accomplishment before returning to his work, now slowly starting the letter L. His hair was stuck up in the back like it always was, he called it his "shark fin." The clear complextion of his face was spotted with some accents of blue, pink, and green from the colors of chalk he had been using in the hour we've been out here. He finally started on the A when my mom walked out, in a white, linen apron.

"We're on duty tonight." She said, wiping a piece of what looked like food off of the white fabric that protected her clothes, before throwing me one aswell.

"What are you talking about?" I caught the apron she threw to me, mine of course bearing stains from substances that I'd rather go unnamed.

"Kitchen duty, it's the end of the week."

Again, this is another chore on the list of reasons why this should be considered a summer job, which I should get paid for if I'm putting this many hours of my life into a building of prostitutes and drug addicts.

Every other Friday night, my mom and I are put to work in the kitchen to serve the arrestees their small serving of dinner. Although most of it looks like vomit, sometimes it's actually kind of decent.

I don't think I can stress the words "kind of" enough. The food is shipped in these cardboard boxes, and I can safely bet that some of the cardboard's toxins sink into food on it's way to the institutions, because that's exactly what it tastes like, pure cardboard.

The scent of chicken ironically filled my nostrils the moment of the thought, a sign of tonight being an example of the "good" dinner nights. I slowly got up from the cold concrete, blackness taking over the sky now, announcing the sun's unfortunate death, however also announcing it's undoubtable resurrection tomorrow, and slipped on my apron. It took a couple of tries to tie the strings behind my neck, I eventually ended up just knotting it together pretty well.