As the clouds dispersed and the sky smiled, what Damon Skywalker and Oliver Leaf once called home parted into debris of planks, blocks and a two mile long waste.
Each on the porch of ruins, looked across their sides of the neighborhood. In that moment of grave restlessness, the two no longer felt the cage of colour that had separated them from contact in the past ten years.
Damon clung to his wooden horse, longing for the company of the one he believes understands him best. Deformed by polio, Oliver watched with caution as people salvaged what was left. Both a little less than two blocks away. Yet, Oliver's skin has been a shade darker than the gloom hovering over them.
Alone, the boys moved at a pace slower than slugs. Thirsty for a connection that their skin colour had made impossible. With no laws barring their ways, Damon held out his wooden horse to Oliver.
" I can have it?" He responded, hands withering in disbelief like the torment of polio that had grossed his life.
It should be a yes or no. But the following silence left a gulf, like a hole dredged at the center of their hearts.
" Your parents?" Oliver cut through Damon's thought, with the sharpness of an excalibur.
Heads bowed, Damon's reply tugged the fragments of a weathering body.
He pushed the toy back to him, and in its stead, he left a warm assurance.
“ It's just us.”
No longer was it about the hue of their eyes, Damon's freckled pale skin, or Oliver's melanin. It was just them. Offering comfort and company to each other in a neighborhood where their course was never meant to grow beyond a traditional handshake.
On the streets, their uncharted course furrowed the brows of passerbys. Some, out of curiosity, threw a penny or two into their begging bowls. Others lacked the patience to observe them as they lumbered towards the ruins of their former paradise. Homes that once witnessed the laughter of two different families.
With only memories left in their accounts, they watch daybreak and nightfall, until Damon's departure grew near. Another white family wanted to adopt him.
Wading through the mire of an impending separation, Oliver carved a little wooden horse. It was as out of form as he was, barely fitting into a picture of something on all four legs. A parting gift he called it, but the boy who waited for years from his cradle to match his porcelain to Oliver's melanin felt his dreams passing.
They told him the choice was his. He could embrace a whole new world with folks of his colour. At best, they would send Oliver into foster care. It was appealing, but never so convincing as the boys knew the truth. They might never see each other again.
So, they chose an alternative that left them huddled like a pack of their own, until Oliver took a bow and left the stage silently, in contrast to the hurricane that claimed his parents life.
That night, when the world looked upon Damon by the mound, it was crystal clear that humanity will always find utterance in lowliness and the most innocent intentions. In that stage, there is neither white nor black. Like Damon, all we see is a part of us.
