Moh: 1

http://i.imgur.com/HDVVyLk.png[/img]  

^ so that's what Moh looks like, if you wanna know. Picture's also up on my wall.

The broken glass above the doorway, hung with twine, chimed as two figures entered the shopspace. Moh looked up from his work as the light from the fragments danced their familiar pattern on the warped old table, and on his face and arms. He smiled widely at the short figure, whom he recognized, and then, briefly, at the tall one, whom he didn’t.

“Apha! it’s been so long!” he said to the little girl. She wore a bright blue hat, its tufted tails tied loosely under her chin.

“Only a few months,” she said, grinning from blue-earflap to earflap. Moh figured that that was a time frame, but he didn’t know what it was, exactly, and didn’t bother to ask. He didn’t ask a lot of things that he could have.

Squatting low on his stool, he pulled her into a hug, and her small, mischievous hands, behind his head, undid the laces of his headscarf. It floated away on a sudden, muggy breeze coming through the doorway, curling in front of him.

He patted sweat from his bare head, the hair on which was cut patchily and close to avoid lice. He didn’t like how ugly it was without anything to cover it.

“Thanks, Aph. I missed you too,” he told the girl into her shoulder. Apha giggled. “You’re tickling me.”

He pulled away, a hand still on her shoulder. She had grown a little since the last time she’d seen him, maybe a screw’s height, a small nail’s at most.

“What brings you here this grand evening?” He gestured with his other arm around the dim, cluttered room, with its wall-to-wall shelves and drawers and the large window that gave an excellent view of a brick wall. the glass fragments and pipe strung from the ceiling, that chimed when there was a wind.

He’d lived there his whole life. He liked it that way.

“Not grand,” corrected Apha. She averted her eyes a little and chewed one tuft of her hat, a nervous habit.

“Yeah, I guess it is a little hot for my tastes, too,” Moh said. It was also stiflingly humid, even in the waning hours of the day.

“Uh huh. Wet and hot. But, Moo, look, I brought someone. He needs help.”

And Moh, at last, turned his attention to the thin figure that had come through the doorway with his old, young friend, the one he didn’t recognize. The boy who was clutching the blue headscarf with bruised knobbed hands.