AS THEY APPROACHED THE CORNER, Mango stopped and shook the man's hand off his shoulder. It was such a decisive gesture that it surprised everyone. Turning back, Mango looked at the apartment with half-closed eyes, which then caught their nervous tic and began to twitch. As his mother watched him through the stalks in the pattern of the lace curtains, she tried to convince herself that his tic was a happy wink, a loving Morse code sending the signal that everything would be all right. O.K.A.Y. That was her youngest son. He smiled even if he didn't want to. He would do anything just to make others feel better.
Mo-Mow pulled the curtain and leaned on the windowsill like a woman seeking company. With one hand, she lifted her cup of tea and lightly tapped the glass with her pearly pink nails. It was a color she had chosen to make her fingers look younger, because if her fingers didn't show her age, maybe the same would be true for her face and her whole self. As she looked towards him, Mango moved again, about to turn back toward the house. Then she signaled him with her painted fingers to go. Go!
The boy hunched his shoulders a little, the backpack a small hump on his back. Unsure of what he should take, he had half-heartedly filled it with nonsense: a Fair Isle sweater that was too big for him, tea bags, his sketchbook with the bent corners, a Ludo game, some half-used tubes of medicinal ointment. Yet at the corner he hesitated, as if the backpack might tip him back into the gutter. Mo-Mow knew it wasn't heavy. She knew it was his very bones that had become dead weight.