Amid shouts of change

The boy moves like a pendulum does on the rubber tire and rope swing. The artist placed him on low tide sand flats. The viewer looks at the swinging boy painted using coffee on canvas paper. The boy is a few feet away, a silhouette steps from the bridge in the foreground. The viewer is a customer in a coffee shop. He orders nothing though it is past midnight. The image before him in shades of caffeine keeps him awake far better than a shot of double espresso could have.

* * *

The girl stands in one triangle of the flared intersection, a bundle of candles for sale in her hand. Supper time is passing as she waits by her mobile candelabra — a rusty tin can emptied long ago of powdered milk and topped with a chicken-wire mesh. On it a buyer could lay a P1, lighted votive candle without wasting the tallow that dripped off as it burned. For extra income, the girl would resell the melted wax.

* * *

The stoplight brings the jeep to a halt at a highway intersection. A boy stands on the entrance step and starts beating a drum with his hands. The rapid but airy percussion reminds the listener of drumbeats peculiar to Brazilian mardi gras. The sound defies the morning that has chosen to stay dusky as daybreak though the clock had marked the ninth hour. The performance ends. No passenger gives money to the boy. He steps off the vehicle and walks back to the sidewalk. The green light shines. The jeep moves on.

* * *

Outside the cathedral, a man goes up to the tempura stall. He orders a P20 serving of the flour and fish street fare. He takes his purse out and tries to take out just enough money to pay for the snack. A boy calls to him to sell some candles. He gives the boy a P5 coin. Soon other boys sell him candles too. The man wonders whether they go to school or not. Surely they do. Surely their hawking is just limited to the weekend feast of the child king whose name graces old church one block away.
* * *

A boy knocks on a car window pane on a rainy night. Traffic has come to a standstill. The boy begs for money. The male driver usually refused to entertain thoroughfare beggars. This time around he takes the time to fish a P20 bill out of his pocket to give the boy who takes the cash. Shortly thereafter, more boys mill about the man’s car in the hope of getting their share.

* * *

After the rain, four boys lay down next to one another on a sidewalk in the north district, right behind the mall. Did they choose this spot hoping the tree branches above them would substitute for a roof? They have no sheets, no mattress, and to soften the concrete surface on which they lay, they spread on it the king bed of the streets — the flattened, brown cardboard box.

* * *

Some politico’s campaign posters, nearly a year old, cling to a column supporting a flyover that ran through a narrow street, the supposed vehicular thoroughfare where drivers continue to jostle with pedestrians and hawkers, all like molecules almost hitting each other in a matrix topped by crisscrossing power lines some firm more than a decade ago pledged to move underground.

* * *

They are seated on the second row, close to the screen. When the movie ends and the lights are switched on, he looks to the floor and sees a trail of empty plastic soda bottles and popcorn barrels their seatmates left behind. In the movie, they found fantastic beasts inside a magical suitcase. In the theater, they find fantastic squalor.

* * *

She tells him to leave the full, black trash bag by the gate. She says it will stay there till the collectors come. Do they come at all? He asks. They do, sometimes, she says. That is why he still passes by mounds of garbage throughout the city. Where does all the refuse go? They go to landfills in the island from where murky fluids run off to the surrounding sea.

* * *

In the halls of power in the country that is becoming unfit for children, the lawmaker sees them as culprits, as scapegoats. Discipline is gone, he says. Our kids need a
good beating, he adds. Better the past, he says, when one could give young ones a whacking when they disobeyed. Children are the problem, he says. Let us jail them when they make mistakes.

* * *

Outside the coffee shop, the customer wonders, will the children be given the chance to play on swings and count bird by bird and grow up to be the men and women who would rebuild the decaying city, or will they be placed behind bars and left there to rot in place of grownups who are guilty of mismanaging the land?
* * *
The coffee-colored silhouette of a boy stands amid the coffee-colored grass in the meadow lighted by a pale coffee-colored canvas paper sky. The boy gazes at heavens dotted by a flock of dark coffee birds distant enough to look like floating lowercase letter Ms.