Masquerade Season

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Pauly should stick to the major roads when walking home from his cousins’ house. That’s what his mother warns, abstractly, routinely, every morning of this summer holiday when she drops him off. He always nods yes, but in this one thing, he is a disobedient son. He’s tried to take the major roads home, but they are so noisy with the grumbling trucks and the plaintive honks from all the cars competing to get ahead. Pauly knows more scenic routes home, less noisy paths that wind between large houses they’ll never afford and parks his mother has no time to take him to. And when Pauly doesn’t want to take this leisurely walk home, there is a shortcut. If he dips behind the mosque down the street from his cousins’ house, scurries across the gutter bridge made of two wooden planks, slashes through some distance of overgrown bush, then hops over the abandoned rusty back gate of Alele Estate, he will burst out two streets away from home. The security guards at Alele’s main gate never question his passage; they wave at his sweaty forehead and smile at the grass masquerades are swooshing in the corner stains he’s accumulated on the shorts his mother makes for him.

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