Burnt Orange.

Were in Ireland now, father brought us here but I don’t know why, maybe it’s because of money or maybe Pa just misses seeing his family every day. Either way I hope we go back to Brooklyn soon, it’s shitty and cold over here, since we’ve gotten off the boat I’ve had a horrible cough and my nose keeps running, I keep whipping it on my new coat’s sleeve and mother keeps slapping me across the head for doing so; she says it’s a rude and disgusting thing to do in front of people. But when I look around all I see are people sneezing and whipping their faces across the sleeves of their own old and thin worn out coats and coughing into their hands, it seems like Dublin is a place where everyone is sick. I wonder if there’s anybody healthy over here. It’s so dark in this town, the sky is grey, the ground is grey, the buildings are grey even the people are grey. Everyone is wearing black, white or grey, they all look like poor priests roaming the street, and someone ought to buy a coat the same color as the autumn leaves back in Brooklyn that would sure lift the town’s spirits. Maybe I’ll save up and buy a box of chalks, I saw these two girls on 5th street with a box of chalks once they said it was for drawing on the streets. I’ll have to use all the colors of the rainbow and draw a huge mural filled with children, happy families and an enormous table filled with all kinds of foods; breads, soups, turkeys, ham some butter and flour and maybe even a few pastries. All this talk about food was making me hungry, ever since we were kicked out of father’s mothers house we’ve been looking for somewhere to stay the night and my legs were getting awfully tired, and my stomach was getting awfully hungry and the twins haven’t stopped crying since we started walking at the crack of dawn this morning. The sun was starting to go down and the street lights were starting to go up, mothers were yelling out windows in a funny accent for their children to get there arses in the house for bed, most of the mothers were thin and frail and had bags under their eyes that were as dark as coal. Their eyes were sunken in and their hair was tied up in buns, they also all wore dirty aprons. I noticed that the children that were running into the houses were mostly the same age as me, some of them looked in our direction and others didn’t but the ones that did looked at us all in the same way; as if we were strange. They looked confused and distorted as they rushed into their warm homes, why did they look at us like that? Was it because we looked lost and abandoned or maybe we look different from them Irish folk, furthermore I still wiped my nose on my sleeve just in case I had any indecent substances hanging and that’s why they were staring. As were walking into no particular direction Pa sees a man with funny clothes on and rushes towards him, there’s a metal crested badge on his shit that says “Police Man” and he’s wearing big dark boots that look like they could crush anything that came in his way, they were spit shined and tied to the perfection, I wish my boots looked like that. As I looked down at my own shoes all I saw was worn out brown corduroy boots that had holes in the soles and my rights boot was missing half of its lace. The man tells us to call him Guard so I do, he tells us we can stay in the prison for the night and ma says thank and hugs the nice officer. When we arrived at the “prison” all the cells were filled with men and women who all smelt like dad when he came home late in the night, some were passed out and those who were still awake sung songs is slurred voices but the prison was warm and that’s all that mattered, I huddled next to the twins and Malachy and soon fell fast asleep.