On the Job

 

Making A Clean Difference even rocking from side to side like that, as if in some humorous skit for the former stage. The right hand trailed one of the larger payung with flat end that commonly doubled as a walking-stick. Man might have seen the weather forecast for afternoon showers the rest of April. Two front teeth left a gap in the smiling pass by the front of the table. Go back... Never sighted previously, yet the man wants you to know his intentions at that hour, a few minutes short 8PM. (Surely his shift was not the 12hr stretch on broom & pan.) Mid- late-70s if not fetched beyond, though in all respects the gap seemed more like 2 - 3 decades. (It remained impossible to comprehend how far it was you yourself had gone off now.) Hopefully there was a helpmate of some description waiting at home with a welcoming plate of food; the short sit at Saddam could not have allowed more than a teh. Almost always this folk invited you into their world—there were no walls in their theatre of the everyday. Aged rheumy eyes like his would not distinguish skin tone and a batik top only scrambled impressions. Of course the familiars always offered greetings of some kind, but strange whites too could not be summarily dismissed. Out of the blue sometimes telling life episodes emerged too that almost wrote themselves into the annals.