Timba and James

I had this deleted for a while, but I'm sticking it back up here. (So I don't lose it ever again) XD What I consider my first serious short story. Submitted for a school event once. Runner up placing.

Timba And James

He sat with his legs hanging over the edge of the world. His toes were tipped forward, almost poised; with the slightest force he could launch himself forward and fly to wherever he wanted.

It wasn’t that I knew him well, but I knew him enough to know that he wouldn't do it. He had always been far too tentative; someone who liked to see exactly where his feet would land, someone who would lay down the path in front of him with sugar-coated dreams.

I admit, it was an intensive observation, especially for a boy my age, or rather our age; fresh out of our intermediate classroom and on our way to what seemed like a higher level of society.

We were both young, born out of the swift summer of January, on the day when the earth was closest to the sun. We had always been in the same class, ever since the day we started school; it was simply coincidence that put us where we were, we could have, should have, become friends, but we rarely spoke, never really met. We have always simply been names to one another, or a nod of a head. The fact that we shared a birthday was probably the closest in similarities you could get between the two of us.

I was the boy who always had paint on his hands, with a head of broad curls, sand-brushed on a sunny day. I followed the trends, or rather they followed me- back in primary school if I showed up with a new pair of 'shutter-shades', half the class would have them the very next week. Never him though, he never gave my bright trail of colours a second glance.

He always dressed conservatively, at least to me it seemed he did; clad in earthen colours, his shirts always had buttons, his clothes lacked creases to an immaculate state, and he always remembered everything. He remembered so intensely to the point that one time last year, when he misplaced his shirt for P.E, his expression was pulled so close to tears. So I let him borrow my shirt, it was no big deal, I always forgot mine anyway.

He had looked so out of place in the black t-shirt with my dad’s favourite band scrawled across the front. It didn't look like him, a different person with a different skin. Of course everyone knew that I had given him the shirt, it was too easy to tell, but no-one said anything. All I can say is that that day, I earned some sort of silent but perpetual respect from the rest of the class.

I sometimes wondered what his family was like to make him how he was. He had a mother and sister, that I knew, I always imagined them in colonial dresses and his house old fashioned and bland, using a fire to heat their stove. It was a ridiculous assumption, but I could never get it out of my head. All I saw was the opposite of my mum, who was always dressed in flora print jeans, who had given me the most annoyingly ‘creative’ name.

He had never said what happened to his father, if he left, or died. No one asked him. It just wasn't something you did, especially if you are a kid. You didn't unsettle him, especially him, his life seemed too neat, too clean, and it made you scared that if you made the slightest touch it would leave smudge on the bleached white linen that had been laid so carefully out for him to live on. It made him seem delicate, breakable, and it wasn't just the students that got the vibe. In fact when he grew his hair out long against the school rules, even the teachers didn't bother him about it, he was just too sincere.

I knew the history in why he grew it of course; it was far from merely trying to cause trouble. It had been just after we started school, at the tender age of six. He used to have hair almost like mine, much darker brown, but gentle folds that arched over his forehead and around his ears.

One day when he turned up to school, his mother had his hair cut off so short to the point where you could hardly say there was hair at all. He wore a hat; a soft knitted one for the winter, all year long. He hid it in his drawer in the classroom at the end of every day.

He had never let his hair be cut since. I think he enjoyed it, the length, the breeze, wearing it lose as he rides his bicycle to school every day, I saw him when I passed him on the way to school as I rode in my dad’s flaming Chevy. He always seemed happy on the two wheels; his dancing hair was his own subtle way of rebelling.

Surely we were free now, far from the reach from our parents. Today was our first day of a new school, a step up in our lives. I shouldn't have been surprised to find that the two of us were the only ones from our old school in this new place. He was the only one I knew, and when I thought about it, I was the only one who knew him. I thought that I should talk to him, become friends, say hello; I mean he was just sitting there, on the edge of the world, waiting for his life to begin. He could do anything, be anything, he had the potential and the smarts, and I had always admired him in that expanse. I wondered what he will pursue here; I knew where I was going, what I would do, my love for the arts ruled both my heart and mind, and for some profound reason, I thought this was the place that we would make it all happen.

I watched him, the back of his head, the wisp on his cheek, a touch of a daydreamer.

I should talk to him now! Yes. It’s now or never.

But I don't want it to seem like I only want him because I have no-one else.

I spent my childhood alongside him. What’s my excuse? How do I say it? How do I make it seem like I am not selfish. It wasn't that I didn't want to be friends with him; it’s just that our paths were so parallel that they never met.

He stood up on the edge of the world and took it all in, the view of everything behind him and everything ahead. He turned around, his eyes were brown and bright, they followed me with the slightest smile on their lashes. He approached me, unlike him, it should have been me, it shames my charisma. He was right in-front of me, face to face;

“Timba," he said to me in an open tone, enforced by a solid gaze "It looks like it is just the two of us now."

I nodded, awe-struck for a moment, then let out my typical grin. He smiled back, a really big smile, the last smile. I noticed his bag, pristine leather, new for a new start, bike helmet wedged under his arm. He was still him, all of him. I had my sports pack, the biggest one I could find, crammed to the edge with all sorts of unnecessary junk. One of us was different. Was it me who had changed?

"It is," I reply to the stroke of luck. He had taken the stand on my behalf, something I was not used to. It felt nice without the prying eyes of everyone else. They expected something from me. Used me as their target, their aim, their figure-head. He didn't care. He let me be myself.

"It’s been a long time," he continued to say, "you should come around."

My imagination went wild; of horse drawn carriages, old cottage pots, to me it still seemed like he had just stepped out of a storybook. I nodded, trying to keep calm and sure, not wanting to seem so curious that I would scare away his offer. He seemed pleased.

"We just moved, our new place is great." He told me of a swimming pool and walls of glass, even astronomy and watching stars from the great big hill behind the city.

It was the start of my new-first friendship. He was far more human than I had seen. We connected, in that one moment I knew it was something strong, something I had been missing all of this time, now I had someone to climb the mountain alongside me. March valiantly through the trudging day. It could have been perfect, my life, my world, my new friendship. I had surprised myself how much I knew of him before it even started.

But in the end it didn't matter the amount of words we had spoken, nor the times we had laughed. Our eight years of silence and one day of life never added up to anything. He had given me his last smile. The next morning he was taken by the road.

A flash of red. The bicycle. I never saw it again.