Kid Moses by Mark R. Thornton

Author:Mark R. Thornton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2015-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

For the next few months, Moses and Kioso stuck together. George understood them pretty well for a man who had never lived on the streets. But it was the country, so things were different for most of the kids. There were no girls. The other boys were from towns all over, but only Kioso and Moses came from a place as big as Dar. In the eyes of the other boys, it was an amazing thing to be from Dar. For them, the big city was an enormous mythical place on the other side of the world, and they always asked Moses to tell them about the harbour and the ocean and all the people.

The others were orphans, but very few of them had been streetkids. Unlike Moses, these kids had lost both parents. Moses still had a parent, a mother somewhere. And an uncle who had beaten him down. Now and then he would wonder why his mother had left him with such a bad man. What was wrong with her? Was she sick? He had memories of her, but they were only images, flashes of her washing, cooking, yelling. He had no memories of affection, only of fear and the belief that he was doing something wrong. She was always angry: at his father, at him, at everything. He would see insane women on the streets, abused, their clothes torn and eyes stoned, mumbling, and he would think of his mother.

This always made Moses feel different. And even though he resented Kioso, who had been safe all the time Moses had searched for him, he didn’t know what it would be like if Kioso weren’t there. Kioso was the only familiar thing, the only kid at the school who understood Dar and the way things were there.

Here it was a different world. On one side of town, the land rose up into mountains and lush farmland, eventually leading to high forests. On the other side, a dry expanse of acacia trees stretched into the distance to where a faint mountain range poked up along the horizon. Bangata was quiet. The school was quiet. They studied reading, writing, and maths, and they played football and did chores around the school.

Parts of Bangata and the school reminded Moses of his father’s stories about the farms, but other things didn’t seem to fit. The images in his head were right, but the feelings were different to the way he had imagined. He was finally surrounded by trees and farms and food, but it didn’t feel like he thought it would. It felt empty, and his dreams of happily riding a bicycle around peaceful farms with his father were gone.

For the first couple of months, he more or less liked the luxuries of the school—the meals, the football, the comfortable beds, the hot water. But he struggled with the regimented ways of school life, and he was always uncomfortable with older men telling him things, whether they were right or wrong, for his benefit or not.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.