Aborigen

Cars rolled by intermittently, stirring up brief breezes for the vendors on the sidewalk before the air stilled and returned to the ambient toast of tarmac. The block party was actually several blocks away, but hopeful restaurateurs and merchants nonetheless set up carts and folding tables for stragglers. A tinny boombox serving loyally well past its prime coughed out something like Spanish guitar to a techno beat at a cart peddling elaborate elote. A tall skinny man wandered around the T-intersection, sometimes daring cars to hit his disenfranchised body, sometimes genuinely confused as to why he left home.

Two tiny men sat on the corner of the curb, sheltered and hidden by a wide, tender leaf in early green, springing from a crack in the pavement where nothing should grow. The tiny men, more or less seven centimeters in height, were familiar with this patch of the neighborhood, where few had the curiosity or energy for a second glance. They knew to keep an eye out for trouble, but on this unseasonably hot July afternoon, trouble was likely hungover and sleeping in late. Atiya and Huckleberry were their names, and they wore stiff, dense doll’s clothing that had only marginally softened with age.

“The roasting corn,” said Atiya. “That’s the smell of home for me. The crisp tang of the burnt husks, the sugar that hangs in the air when the silk chars.” He hummed briefly, watching a large pair of Converse plant, wait, and roll impatiently before the elote cart.

Huckleberry said, “Maybe, if you grew up around here, but I moved here from Cinquefoil Warren not long ago. Sitting this close to the cart is stifling for me. When the breeze turns, I can hardly breathe.”

Atiya laughed. “If you don’t like it, we can move.”

“It’s not always so bad. Here, here comes a Land Rover.” They waited, and when the gleaming black monstrosity glided by like a blue whale, the breeze indeed turned. “Oh, oh! There, did you catch that?”

“Sickeningly sweet. It’s like that Korean chewing gum, meant to freshen a girl’s breath.”

Huckleberry shook his head and licked his lips. “Not at all, my friend. That’s the scent of girlfriend, right there. It’s sweet, but there’s still something exciting behind it, like she listens to alternative. I bet her bedroom’s decorated in tangerine and cerise, magazines on the floor, copper wire lights glowing in a cloud around her headboard.” He grinned at his darker friend. “She probably writes poetry, too, but that can’t be helped. It’s as much a rite of passage as shoplifting.”

Atiya stared at his paler friend. “That’s more than association. Did you date a Biggo?”

Huckleberry started with “I—” and spun out immediately into gasping laughter. “It wasn’t so much dating as a prolonged truce, I guess. I went from secret admirer leaving notes, to a belief in fairies, to a personal muse, to… okay, well, maybe.” He picked at a slight bump on the side of his neck. “It’s not like we could go out as a couple, obviously, but yeah, we had a, uh, sure.”

“And she wore that crap?”

“My metabolism must be different, because I just like it.”

“I’m glad you’re still around to tell the tale.”

They watched the gaunt man drift in a wide arc through the intersection. Now he was furious about something, yelling at the second floors of some of the businesses in the area.

The wind shifted. Both the men leaned forward: Atiya closed his eyes, Huckleberry opened his mouth slightly, and they snuffled. “What is that,” asked Huckleberry.

Atiya tilted his head. “What is that?” They studied it for another couple of moments before Atiya pegged it as cardamom. “It’s like breakfast cereal, right? But this is like…”

His body rocked in his stiff poncho hoodie. “All right, I guess I got a little story too. I was hiding in the walls of this one place about, well, a long way off.” He waved north, where the not-great neighborhood got worse. “I was fine with whatever fell my way, you know. There was always something. The family, whose house it was, they couldn’t afford a dog so it’s not like I had to fight with him for scraps.

“But this one time, the little girl saw me. I hid immediately, of course, but she kept looking for me for days. Her mom’d yell at her, tell her to knock it off, so I started feeling bad for her. Not for myself, I could’ve hid in that place for months, easy, but she just wasn’t giving up.”

He looked down, snorted, and smiled. “One time she gave me a Froot Loop. Froot Loops and Trix smell the same, and eventually I figured out it was cardamom, or else they just happen to smell like cardamom. And citric acid and oats. She left this big ol’ lemon yellow ring by the crack in the trim where she saw me. I smelled it, and I watched her, and she backed out of the room and left. I gave it another five minutes, then dragged it inside. Nothing happened, so I snacked on that for, like, two days.” He glanced at his friend. “It was really good, too. All that sugar, my body needed that. And it was new, not half-chewed, not soaked in milk. She gave me a good one.”

Huckleberry grinned back. “Anything else?”

“I was out ranging around, looking for supplies, and I found a ring in the gutter. Not fancy but still in good condition. I spent an afternoon rubbing out the scuffs, flossing out the dirt in the mount, just dressing it up.

“There was a pattern to how the family moved each morning. The mom would stomp around and complain, yell at the kids to get ready for school. This girl had an older brother and sister who went off to school, but she stayed home all day. The mom worked from home and the girl was left to entertain herself. Well, I left the ring right where she left me the Froot Loop, after her mom had quieted down. She came padding in, looking for snacks, and she found the ring. I wasn’t anywhere near it, I just let her find it.” Atiya’s cheekbones bulged with his smile. “She was so happy, and she was smart enough not to go bothering her mom about it. So that was our arrangement: she’d leave me a nice piece of food, and I’d go out and look for something fun for her, like a little action figure or a shiny coin.”

There was a long silence, broken by Huckleberry. “I’m guessing there’s a bad end to that story. You don’t have to finish it.”

Atiya shrugged. “I just hope she’s okay, that’s all.”

They turned slightly to see two pairs of women’s feet in sandals standing behind a large dog. Not a large one, a small brindled bulldog, but large to them. The bulldog lost its grin and started sniffing around the sidewalk, getting closer to the rebellious little leaf in the crack of the sidewalk.

“You want this one, or me?” asked Huckleberry, but Atiya gestured for him to give it a minute. The beast’s glistening, leathery nose swept side to side slowly, nostrils inhaling and exhaling at the same time, depositing scents and categorizing them. The broad head held still as it picked up Atiya’s scent and sorted the other, new scent. Curiosity sated, it wheeled around to sniff at the trash with roasted cobs, while the huge feminine feet shifted slightly, sticking out of the shirring of lacy summer dresses, their toes twitching occasionally. They wouldn’t come any closer, so Atiya turned back to the street while Huckleberry gawked.

“Don’t do it, man. It never ends well.”

“I know that,” Huckleberry said, turning back. “It’s just nice to see once in a while. And they just washed those dresses, it reminded me of the time we raided a department store after hours.”

“Good haul?”

“One of the stupidest damn ideas I’ve ever heard. I went along with it, like an idiot, because I didn’t know any better. It took so long to cross the floor of one room, we didn’t know where we’d ended up. We could smell the food court, but we had no freakin’ clue where to begin to look for it.” Huckleberry shook his head sharply, jerkily. “The glossy floors, everything on pedestals and boxes, all those creepy-ass mannequins that… They don’t even have to do anything, you just sense them behind you and it triggers your tuck-and-roll so you don’t get stepped on. It was embarrassing and needlessly stressful.”

He straightened up and took a deep breath, trying to clear the shadows of memory from his coppery-haired skull. “Like I said, we couldn’t even find anything useful. Everything was strong perfume, formaldehyde and packing scents on all the fabrics. Disorienting, hard to think with that shit in your nostrils. We got lost, we were low on energy, we started complaining and then fighting each other. I got two of them to break off with me and try to find our way out again, but the others insisted food was just around the corner. Never saw them again.”

Atiya said, “So, not a pleasant memory, then?”

“No. That woman smells like disaster, like a nightmare.” He looked back at her strappy sandals and how her hair-thin anklet glinted in the afternoon light. “Nice toes, though, if she’d let me strip that chalky polish off her nails.”

“She looks fine,” muttered Atiya, looking out across the street again. A Cruiser was pulling up and the gaunt man was slow to process what the black and white meant, started picking an argument with the driver who was getting out with practiced slowness. “That’s it for him, I guess.”

A large, almost glowing red sphere rolled at them on the sidewalk, bouncing excitedly with the small flaws in the terrain. “Heads up,” barked Huckleberry. The tiny men rose to their feet, on the edge of the gently sloping curb. They planted their toy shoes on the sandy concrete and met the superball head-on. It had too much mass and momentum to head back where it came from, but they angled it away from themselves and back at the two pairs of huge feet. One of the giant women must’ve seen it coming, because one foot raised and hovered, waiting for the juddery red globe to roll and wobble away, before setting heavily down upon the pavement again. Within seconds, two smaller feet in little-girl sandals came pounding up the sidewalk, with a “scuse me!”, and rounded the giantesses’ long drapery skirts without much dexterity. Nonetheless, the girl got her superball and her sandals slapped back up the sidewalk to her family.

When the action died down, the two tiny men resumed their seats. “There’s no way that was your little girl, was it?” Huckleberry asked. “Because that would be funny if it was.”

Atiya shook his head and watched the tall, skinny man disappear into the back of the Cruiser, which rolled away like an orca. He sniffed the heady alcohol on his hands, residual from the superball. “And now I guess we’ve got our scent for the day.”