the back alley

The lamp post stands tall into the sky. Tall yet lonely. Tall yet old, tall yet out of place if you take a glance at the new building built nearby. Tall yet failing to light a wide range around. The alley is dark a few meters away, even the circle around, you wouldn’t call bright or luminous, it’s just a hazy bright, an electric candle lit in the midst of the back alley. A few steps away from it and as the light grows weaker and weaker, the patches of tar, here and there to mend the pavement, which look more like these huge dots splashed over the dark surface, start to melt into the tar darkness gaining more and more weight toward the end, the end of the alley where a fence is raised high to make it a dead-end.
The weather gets darker and then brighter as lightning strikes the grayish clouds scattered here and there, far and away. Lights of the cars coming to a halt behind the traffic light, lights of the cars driving away and around, get blurry and blurrier. The rain has started. If you stare at that very hazy light of the lamp post for a while, you can see the rain pouring. The occasional sirens of ambulances and fire engines rushing through the wet streets are the only sounds disturbing the silence of the falling shower.
The clouds gradually put down their loads. The weather gradually loses its weight. Darkness gradually starts to fade, and the hazy light of the lamp post fades alongside in the first rays of light creeping over the alley.
Little pounds of rainwater encircle the mending patches of tar here and there on the pavement. Larger ones encircle the seemingly out of order ventilation systems left over the roof of the building to the right, making them look like kind of tiny watermills alongside the patches of grass grown here and there over the rooftop, grass green as those of meadows wet with the early morning dew.
The fence at the end of the alley glitters with drops of water still clinging to its metal net. So do the ones bordering the unattended-to back yards of the one or two shabby houses lining the alley to the left. Little patches of some puffy material you can see along the fence, one in the street, another one or two in one of the back yards. You are just imagining they are some wind-blown dry bushes, some wadded garbage, or maybe some outcast’s clothing, when one of them, the one at the foot of the lonely lamp post starts moving around, not any huge leaps, just minuscule crawls that you have to open your eyes and look a little bit more to grasp. You look a little bit more and there is no doubt that the tiny mass of the puffy thing is moving toward the fence. And then suddenly as if in a kind of an improvised play, the other two, the ones in the yard also move toward the fence, to the very spot the first one had started to move. You pay attention and there awaits them a bowl, perhaps of some food, now more of a soup with all the rain water added to. The two from the yard reach the bowl and busy themselves licking, sometimes playing naughty, most of the times just licking. The one outside, the one who had first started moving, has just stopped, you realize, a few steps from the lamp post, seemingly cuddling itself, taking a nap in the middle of the road.
A wind blows, some leaves move around the pavement. A towel is hung over the balcony rail of one of the shabby houses, the one to the left, with terra cotta bricks, one of the windows of which has a cracked glass, and the railings of which are rusted over and over again that there seems to be left nothing more inside their metal bars. You have missed who hung the towel there. Something moves along the building to the right, taking your gaze to itself. A woman comes out, a large throwaway plate in her hand, filled with something that looks like a puree of something. She moves to the fence, the puffy creatures move back, she puts the plate down, pours water out of the bowl, puts it back, moves the plate next to the bowl, steps back toward the building and goes in. the creatures move back to take their position. The other one is not moving, and then you see one more, all black, moving, over the huge metallic green crane parked in the middle of the alley, toward this other end, the open end. It moves mischievously, playfully, and jumps to the ground with the flexibility and strength of tiny kittens. It joins the crowd around the bowl. You look around and the towel in the balcony is gone.
Hours pass by. A young man appears from the building, the one to the right, the same one the woman appeared from. He walks the few meters to the other side, toward the fence, and as he walks these pigeons busy picking on the pavement scatter around, not flying by, just walking lazily a few steps here and there, just scattering. The man looks at the large plate, walks a few steps around, walks back to the plate, looks at the bowl, walks a little bit more around, a few more steps further, scattering the birds a little bit more, comes back to the plate, to the bowl, looks around, takes the plate, looks at it, looks around, smells the food, pours out the little water in it, puts the plate back, walks around, looks around, stops at the fence and then goes back to the building to the right. You look around and your lazy kitten is no more near the lamp post. You look around and your gaze gets stock upon the wooden plates blocking the window panels of this building under restoration. You wonder how does it look from inside, you wonder what can be going on on the other side. You steal away your gaze and you find your kitten, near the fence, its head bowed into the bowl. The towel is again on the balcony rail.
Hours pass by. You look at the alley and nothing is moving, all is still, all is safe. You take in the whole picture and can easily imagine Timbuktu wandering around the corner, shyly stealing some food from the large plate, yet leaving some, hiding in a dark corner to lie down, and feeling all the sadness of the world upon him as he sees the fences at the end of the alley as he little by little feels heavy under the spell of sleep. You look around and nothing moves. All is still. All is safe.
Minutes pass by. You are not looking at the alley. You are just dreaming the dream of Timbuktu. And then you are startled out of it by cries, loud, in anger, in desperation. The shouting goes on. You look at the back alley. All is the same. The shouting goes on and on, for seconds, for minutes. You look around and on the other side of the shabby buildings along the pavement of the newly-built huge chrome modern establishment on the other side, walks this teenager, his baggy jeans barely clinging to his waist, his white T-shirt two sizes large, his cap hiding his face from the heat of the sun. He is shouting into his cell phone, shouting, cursing, shouting, cursing. A man and woman, the man hugging the woman, both in swimsuits, lean on the rails of the rooftop to watch. The boy continues pacing up and down, all the time shouting and cursing.
You move your eyes from the street, from the building to your shabby back alley. You close your ears to all the cursing. The tiny creatures move around the bowl. The lamp post stands tall into the sky. The pigeons sit silently over the electricity line leading to the lamp post. And next to the fences at the end of the alley, you see this lump that you decide is one or another Timbuktu and is perhaps nothing but a dry old piece of a dead tree trunk.