By William Hayward
The twelve o’clock English sun was shoving itself on everyone who walked on the cracked pavement of that street. I could see it on all the people’s faces. The businessmen hurrying to their equally hot cages while pulling at their stiff confining collars and blinking the colourless sweat away from their eyes. The mothers with unusually quiet children were clenching their worn-out hands at their sides, while flipping their limp hair over their faces for some kind of protection, and the faceless people who you see every day were just letting their bodies decompose in the sun without any signs of struggle except for a constipated expression on their faces.
I was no different. I had my shoulders hunched up to my ears for some shade; my coat, which I always bring out in the wrong seasons, dangling from my forearm, and my hands cracking as I flapped them angrily to cool them down.
Then I saw it. A girl with mousy hair, who had just broken the nose of her boyfriend in a doorway, ran into the street and slammed into the shoulder of the girl I was following.
I hadn’t noticed I was following her until that happened.
I remembered seeing her face for the first time half an hour before. She had been coming out of a retirement home on some nameless street and instantly I saw her more clearly than I had ever seen anyone else; her body, her mouth, her eyes, even from the distance I was standing I could see the glow of pureness that came from her eyes. I wanted her straight away. But I had not noticed that the streets I had been walking down were not my usual, so when the other girl, who still had blood dripping from her cracked knuckles, slammed into her, the force of it made me blink and see where I was.
I was lost, and the girl with the pure eyes was trying to get balance on her gimp leg. She almost fell twice while I just watched and twitched. I thought of how this girl who looked so heartbreakingly kind could show me happiness.
But I just watched as she got her balance and limped away.
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William Hayward was born in January on the twelfth, to a vicious carrot top mother and a father with personality issues.
The Pygmy Giant 