“Kid Cloud” by Niko Firkin
We will never know if kids today are more bored now than they ever have been. What a wealth of tv they posess, what a bounty of internet, what variety in confectionary and playthings. Every xmas, trucks full of new electronic equipment is designed and shipped into their bright new anorak pockets.
When I was young we would pass the time hunting for small fish and catching squirrels and rats. We would eat the same 7 evening meals each week and try to amicably beg small change from the local gentry just for being cute. The proceeds we would then spend on liquorish bootlaces and sherbet handbags. From time to time my mother would instruct us on crafts. Sewing badges, oiling cricket bats, making pastry; but nothing which could be counted as a self-directed hobby. I sometimes think that we were just unpaid labour used to fill in the gaps.
Children now make movies on their portable phones. I have seen them gaggle around passersby. Their worthless bodies become a vapour of worthless chaff; they absorb their faces into green electronic glows and float around in clouds behind goingson in the street.
When idle, they flitter about under the trees. Observant glowflies, they await fresh content to store and promote on their various web alibiiis.
I took a stroll down lodge lane early one evening where I knew there to be many insect chroniclers in operation. People seemed to leave the intermingling groups to their own devices, but I have decided to track them and try to appreciate their patterns.
I saw some flickering lights hover around a dizzy, running man. They heard him babble incoherently and fall to his knees. They excitedly reformed their cloud for better viewpoints as he vomited between his hands. They closed in on his face and flew off.
The luminescent squares gathered by an offlicence and gestured older young people. Some of those approached bought the cloud cigarettes but then mockingly smoked them, 6 at a time, blowing back into the cloud. It thickened and swirled and departed in many directions. (I later heard that some were prosecuted for involvement in the cloud’s habits.)
I saw a woman, repeatedly sweeping the same patch of pavement just outside her house. She was calmly performing her daily routine but a large cloud appeared and made her more conscious of what she was doing. She panicked and yelped and then ran inside as the cloud conjured up small rocks and dust and whipped them at the windows.
The cloud’s increased energy levels now moved on to the high street where a pizza delivery operative attempted to load his car. Their viewfinders zoomed in as the Velcro heatsaver bag unfastened. The cloud’s erratic but controlled movements showed excitement at the food and the nervous driver swiped some away. They closed in and he had to flail into the cloud to alleviate his nerves. It became a standoff between a few hundred cameraphone lenses and a man trying to perform an urgent food delivery. I didn’t see how it ended because I had to leave.
The bodies of the children began to rematerialise. Hunched up, polyester-clad thin bodies started to come out of the backs of the squares. Eyes and teeth began to grin through the darkness of the night inbetween the flash lighting of the cameras. Hundreds of bored children slipped back into this dimension. High on trouble and their first nicotine; inspired by harassment on the elderly; lured by free sugar and salt; they closed in on the delivery man.
I couldn’t intervene.
Words by Niko Firkin, Illustration by Georgia Ropek