waits for the rain to stop

under the kebayoran lama flyover: a policeman sits crosslegged on a thin bench balanced by two boys playing cards at the other end. sometimes, patience is just a game you play while you wait. and wait. then the black river starts. little ships of plastic aqua glasses float fast - all the captains had jumped the lifeboats - on its surface. the ripped blue plastic lids stick out like broken sails. a woman steps into the heavy rain, the water falling like cold pebbles, lifts her batik sarong, and puts one foot in the rushing black water. an aqua ship hits her instep. she lets it run around her ankle like a reconnoitring pirate ship. a cendol man opens a tweed-patterned parasol and puts it over, not his head, but his clay cendol jar. big sweats of rain already on its brownblack surface. no, the rain doesn't fall, it blows horizontally and hits your face like a cavalry of angry trains. and the smell of dead chickens, dried fish and rotting vegetables picked at 3 a.m. this morning, floats up to the grunts of slowing cars on wet asphalt above.

stop it!

the problem is my obsession to find beauty in ugliness. it's evil. more evil than ugliness itself. i'll tell you something, simply, a story, or just a footnote in a bigger story? i don't know but it's like this: outside ak.sa.ra., drizzle, light enough for me to walk under it, on the pavement, wet black, a family of seasonal scavengers, oh i don't have to tell you then, it's a few days before lebaran, the dad building pyramids of aqua glasses, the mom resting with both legs spread in a v in front of her, their child, a little balita girl in a peasant dress two sizes too small for her, the hem of the dress barely covers her ass, playing with two black stones, one in each hand. she strikes a conblock. thwack! the stone jumps out of her hand, as if the conblock, for the duration of that brief thwack! acted as conduit for the electricity of the earth, the electricity of the sad reality that she was and they were a homeless bunch of scavengers sheltering under browning plastic the dad has tied between the cart he's been lugging all day, his daughter standing in the back looking at all the traffic behind, the only comfort she gets from the cold of metal lining where she rests her chin, and a sick-looking grey tree he hopes doesn't fall when the storm hits? i don't know. whatever strikes the child, makes her cry. her dad, calmly, takes the tops off his pyramids and rolled them on the conblocks, towards her, to play with.