WALLS

     Yesterday I sent a proposal and chapters to my agent. It's a cross-genre work with odd elements that fascinate me. Oh, I hope I get the chance to write this middle school series.

     Dickens and Fob meet on a cold misty morning, waiting on a rotting dock, hoping to be chosen, hired  for day-work. Neither of them want mine-work or stall mucking or ditch digging. Chimney sweeping pays best ......because it is so dangerous....

     Dickens is the seventh boy from the left. He is proud of the brass buttons on his coat. They don't match. He stole them one at a time, from different shops.  Fob is the second boy from the right. He is older than he looks--early starvation stunts a lot of the street children.  

Dickens voice:

     The first thing I remember is a cold, muddy road.

        I was small, scared and hungry, running alongside a painted carriage, crying, holding out my hand, begging for coins. I was sure that someday a pretty woman wearing a blue dress would notice me. She would stare out her polished glass window, then shout at the driver to stop the horses. When she opened the carriage door, she would burst into tears and pick me up—mud and all—because she was my mother.  

            I can’t remember who told me the story about mothers, but I believed it. So every night for a year I whispered to the moon, practicing what I’d say when she finally found me. Then one spring day, begging on the woods road again, I saw a dark-haired boy lean across his mother’s lap to look down at me through the glass, and I was sure he was my brother. My heart almost stopped—I ran to keep up, shouting, pleading, but no one looked back. The carriage left me behind.  

            So I began to wonder.

            I asked a few of the other boys how they had gotten to the Old City. No one knew. No one wanted to talk about it, either, because it didn't matter. The Old City has as many orphans as it has crows and rats and there is never enough food for all of us.