The boy who stole the sky.

In response to the daily prompt
Sky

I saw it peeking through the branches crisscrossing up above my head, triangles, slices, reflected in the varicose veins on the ugly thighs of the jungle.

Even in the desert I found, blatant poker-faced staring at me while the sands stir and stir at my feet, chewing up the casualties of memories in sandstorms that leap, bounds and erases in undulating heaps. It watches in passing, recording the world’s transgressions in its sleep.
The cocoon of blue, red, purple cracked with lightening; colour palette reflecting, emulating wrathful gods of human imagination.

Sky, that rains and pour and is set alight by anger, fireworks of happiness. The infinity scarf wrapped around a celestial neck, blue and unwavering.

All of us see it, admiring it’s endless capacity to grow old. A hundred eyes look up everyday, out of seven billion, now isn’t that a shame?

One day though, everyone noticed, more men looked, pointed at the funny object. A corner of the sky was broken, letting in blackness from beyond the spherical token of the earth.

The papers, the people, the legislature ranted. Concrete evidence, proofs were demanded. Yet there was only a missing black spot, like someone had grabbed it and broken a piece right off.

So I began to chase after the missing piece of the sky.
I went to the jungles, with the crisscross branches that hide the sky, I erased myself in the blowing dust of golden sands and twilight. Everywhere I went, that gaping hole went with me, fiercely standing out in a sky previously quite unseen.

No clue, no resemblance, nowhere could I find the missing piece of the sky, till one day I happened to pass by a street where a young boy lived, who was blind as a bat with empty sockets and emptier dreams.

He had begged and pleaded for a new set of eyes, ‘to see the sky once’, he had explained to uncaring adult shoulders.
Ungainly limbs dusted with soot blessings, a crooked bowl clutched with nails the size of pea seeds.
He sits in silence, looking down at the ground. Absently a silent coin drops from my finger to the steel hollow of an entreaty, chiming, twirling till it spins then stills.
A tiny head tilts up as if to catch a drop of rain, the eyes land like search lights on my face.
Magnanimous,fathomless two ocean pools of unchanging blue,
Two orbs staring at me from a half-square face, a smile stretching over eroded milk teeth and a rejected soul.

I hurry on, unsettled as I imagine a lonely five year old urchin climbing a mountain, slowly each hand and foot hold, the slippery roads till he reaches with his tender limbs still babyish and unhurt, and breaking like one breaks a biscuit, a corner of the sky.
His tiny hands breaking them into two, then patiently fitting them in the hollow sockets of his eyes.
A philanthropist sometime later very generously fitted one day, a big white stone he called the moon, hiding the gaping black hole with a phoenix-like eroding stone.
So the story of the boy came to be, the story of a sightless five year old boy who can see us all in his horizonless dreams, watching over us as we stir in our sleep.