Spots Of Time.

Eight.

"Hey where are you off to?"

Hari wails out to the moving cycle.

The crows caw to cleanse, the dogs grazing into the patches of dump and dirt for glitter, and the sparrows all forgotten like antique pieces nestling in the ventilators, squirming summers in the spring, spring is torn in this part of the region, and when springs are killed, the actions look plain, the desires look bleak, the soul looks appeased but not in bliss.

The cook hesistates for a moment, then tersely brakes and turns around to face the homeless boy. His face was wobbly, sweat marks pouring and swearing for evaporation.

The sky was as blue as an ocean, with clouds posing as waves, concealing the shrines of the gods. They say there are three roads down the village that lead to the same tree where branches hold dead memories, the natives sometimes come to grieve and bereavement is a cliche in every culture, the dead are never gone, the branches are the mausoleums of the buried, the land is now a cavort for the spirits for the humans fled.

"I have no time, what do you need?"

"But tell me where to?"

"I need to check upon the villagers."

"Yeah, tell me if you find any. And don't tell you've got no time. Denial is said to be the longest river around the detainment camps."

Hari chuckles and starts beating the cook's dingy backseat with a mundane stick, throbbing the cook's head and conjuring up perturbations amidst the torrid land.

"Lay your hands off. Who do you think you are?"

"Can I come with you?"

"Ah, come. Dusk will soon follow. Hop on."

The dawn was another dawn though, the sun still emitting energy with Jasmine complying to her duties as the heir  to the Sun, and missing her lover, weeping when the realm of darkness shrouds her tears like the fallen willow tree and stars glitters as specks to consoling her through the ostensible constellations.

But time was still suspended.

Nobody knew why time was accursed by the serendipity of the two lovers.

Nobody knew which day it was.

Nobody knew which hour it is.

Everybody knew the uniformity was broken.

"Will you keep the shop closed then?"

"I don't know when I shall return. There is a truth I must seek. My heart can't fathom this misery anymore. Whatever happened to those two?"

"Who? Do you mean the lovers?"

"Yeah, the daily worker and the queen. Remember Hari, the queen visiting from her world was for the greater good, and Ansteckend to have fallen in love with her, I hope daata knows what he's doing. Fate really plays her tricks in seldom ways. I must go around and unearth this boiling cauldron in my heart whatsoever be the judgement."

"Hey, are you crazy, khura?"

"What? Get lost from here, you rascal. Calling me crazy, you just skim stones down like you could just walk on water, you incumbent."

"No, khura, those two are separated now. You know time is hung up, right?"

"I don't consider I should know the realm of politics. But then again, time shouldn't have been suspended like that. The world is suffering. The world could go to rubble just like that."

The heat from the sun that day was all sordid and groaning after the officials threw Ansteckend down the pits.

Time grew out branches, cuticles, irrevocableness to cessation to the disruption in the motions of the universe.

Time in her abandoned state, time in her puny gib, passing as the cushioned clouds, relinquishing the records, heralding a new age where days mumbled to cease to night and when the veil of darkness finally got lifted to another sunrise, time crawled, her breath gauged whilst she kept on crawling for that bowl of water till another, another day for the sensations of the eye to have witnessed truth in its own solitary acclaimed and get the batch of diurnal events sent down to the realm of censorship to sanitization.

Shops were either closed down, abandoned, sold to the gods in return for goods and settlement in the dire detainment camps.

Taxes were dropped, the officials emptied the banks, the robbers locked up with the cops, nature twirling around moribundity, a patchwork of the veridity embracing the foundations of electricity.

Houses were just houses, without homes.
Everybody moved where time became active.

Since no one could keep track of time, no one could attend to the diurnal, everybody slipping into a cesspool of leisure times, circling around, blurring all lines of distinction to laying out a handful of guilds and settling in the lands where mornings are for those chopping more wood for the trains.

Farms were just vacuum ordinary spaces devoid of any functionality, the windmills clueless and incognizant, birds couldn't fly, the wind didn't blow, Ansteckend's world was as if vanished from the universes, from the verses of the creation, stripped off its identity, habitation is just a wasteland in the worlds of the scholars, the land if akin to a circular, spherical hamster wheel, aren't humans playing god again to depleting Adam's power of appellation, to leading banners of frugality for their own abuses, cherishing their satiation through eating their own tails, consumers are sellers in parallels, tadpoles are frogflies in Jasmine's world, fireflies are singers and an or or orchestral symphony with luminous glands, worlds are once again shuffled and re-shuffled till time was in an apprehension to relinquishing her vaunted calculations, being questioned for rifts that started appearing out of nowhere.

Ansteckend was trapped in the realm of the illusion. He met scholars who were exiled for their own reasons, where springs were reminiscent of other springs.

In the sultry summer, the crassy cook and the boy with stones decided to go around the village, clarifying their own doubts.

The cook brought some rice balls, some peanuts, others were all water he'd sediment in in his fusty hut and later store in his fusty lacquered bag. Whilst the boy settled up in the backseat with his phullan acting as a cushion.

"You know I've never seen Ansteckend like that."

"Like how?"

"Like you know. Spending his daylight hours into conjuring all sorts of gifts for his beloved."

"Isn't that what love is?"

"But his boat shop went bust. What good did it make?"

"He met her, khura. I wish I meet someone someday after many many years. I'd be delighted if she's the queen of the streams."

"Yeah so you could feed her pebbles, that's your plan, or oh! I see, loverboy, drown in her love for real."

"Khura, looks like you've got a queen of your own somewhere to whom you've fed all your shit didn't you, anyway, fuggetbootit but why do gods hate love now?"

"Gods do not hate love you penniless wrench. It's just that they didn't think ahead of what would or might happen when worlds parallel in alignments collide. You know gods who wove the worlds did not just weave this one."

"Are you for real or just guzzling the coconut rum in your ugly bag again?"

The cook whistles as he paddles through the mud and potholes of his world, escaping his diurnal world of swirling ladles and heating up the same greased up pans.

"Look out, crazy khura."

"Ah, not in that rubbish again."

The cycle crashed and clanged to the debris of gravel.