Rolando André

They were both middle-class kids, and this matters much to the story. At least he thought of it that way. She didn’t think of it that way because she didn’t think of it much at that time. He then remembered that, usually, when he began to think this way—what she wears, blue or green or anything—it means that he was thinking about her when she wasn’t in front of him, which in turn means that the next time she’d be in front of him, he would feel strange, because all those thoughts that he’d thought of her would crowd his mind so much that you can’t he wouldn’t be able to see the colors in her backpack or purse. Like a traffic jam of fragments and words and colors, stuck in thought's paved highways. 

She was in the classroom. The professor talked about flux and permanence. Et cetera, she thought. Et cetera and more. She wanted to talk to her friend about what had happened in the place the night before. She looked at the blue sky through the window and remembered that when it rains the soil turns mud and that feet stand on the mud, not in the mud.

Thinking of the mud-brown or of any color at all meant that she was thinking indirectly about him. And now even when she thought of the word “color” and not of any particular color, she was, in some way, thinking about him. Color was starting to crowd her mind, and she could not believe this. She raised her hand.

“Professor, I wonder what Plato or Heraclitus or any of these philosophers would say about human passions in relation to the facts of impermanence and flux and the things of the world. How, say, for example, the feeling of love towards someone or something, the natural attraction of all things human and feeling, how that goes into the universe equation. Or something else, like the color of—” she stopped short, trying to think of another color, but, alas, there was none other to think of. So, she finished the sentence thus: “the color of mud… brown.”

“That’s what my parents always say,” another boy says. “But I’m not going to miss anything made of fire or night.”

The other boys agree and applaud him. All of them, even the girl, have black rings under their eyes.

The girl crosses her arms. “You’ll see it,” she mutters to herself. “It’ll end soon, and you’ll only know that it’s over when you grow up.”

But that night, sitting alone on the porch of her house, after having received forehead-kisses from both her parents, looking at the boy sitting on the porch of the house across the street, looking at all the children sitting on the porches in all the houses she can see from left to right, she thinks that she does not actually like the firestars, but only that she is supposed to like them, and that she is only supposed to like them when they stop. That is, she does not really need to like the firestars right now, she only needs to miss them when she doesn’t see them alive anymore. But all this supposing makes her sick, so instead she lets her thoughts turn to the black night sky, hoping that she won’t fall asleep, because she supposes that it is better for the children to catch the firestars than it is for them to fall asleep and let all the houses go up in flames.

Because if the houses go up in flames, then her parents will die, and if their parents die, then her own children will not have any grandparents.

But if her parents die, she won’t have to hear all this about tradition and the firestars. She won’t have to look out for the firestars at all. Somebody else could do it.

But somebody would always have to do it.

He was called Rolandito like I was called by my parents and my grandparents. But this is about Rolandito not about me, this is about a four year old, actually no it’s about something else, it’s not about 1999 when he was 4 and I was 8, it’s about 2000 when I was a little older, a little young but still a little older, and Rolandito was still four even though he might have been older too, he was still four and frozen. I was nine maybe and I was in a classroom and it was always hot in there and I was in my science class and in my science class we were talking about something, I think maybe we had gone off-topic and the topic was done with and we were just talking, and I don’t know how it was brought up, conversation-wise, but I know that it all started with a raised hand, the raised hand of a boy, a boy named Christian, or that’s how it starts for me in my memory anyway, with the teacher looking at a seat behind me, me turning my head to see the raised hand of Christian, the athletic black-haired boy who never let me play volleyball.