~Imagination~

             

                  I was probably 5 or 6 years old when we would do this. Walking around an untouched construction site, lined with large metallic skeletal towers. The place never did seem to progress at all. Odd holes dug into odd places among rusty pipes and ruptured concrete. But it would do.
                 We didn't live in a very nice neighborhood at the time, to say the least. So, for our own safety and safekeeping, during the days when parents were off at work as they always were, we found our stay at the house of Miguel and Jeana. Never quite caught their last names, but it didn't matter. Especially when you're a kid. All I knew ( or cared to know), was that they cared for us. Like family. Though I'm pretty sure looking back that of them all, only Miguel was a U.S. citizen. And a great one. Miguel was a profoundly hard working man. He worked in construction, tattered tool belt always in hand(which I'm sure his wife enjoyed), while Jeana worked at various stores as a cashier. So while they were gone, there wasn't much to do so, Game boys in hand, my brother and I walked right on out the back door. But of course "solo despues de terminando sus frijoles y arroz". Only after finishing our beans and rice. Tyson would have loved to join, or at least cried so much you'd think he did, but as always found himself asleep in a back room with Miguel's baby daughter, the Disney movies entertaining themselves.
                 You always had to watch your step in their backyard. Neither Jeana or Miguel had time to clean up the poop, not that it's really their fault, so consequently their deranged dog "Tiger" made quite a minefield out of it. You could smell your impending doom far before you stepped into it, which often happened. Luckily their backyard gate wasn't very far, and leading up to it were red stepping stones with two foot distances between them that I would hop across. It wasn't so bad. I really liked Frogger at the time. Once across the smelly moat, I'd swing myself out through the fence gate and fall in step with Alex.
                 Sun beams reigned over the expansive plain before us, devoid of grass but plentiful in dust and limestone. In the moments before trespassing onto the site, I could feel my body attempt to soak up the shade of the collapsing driveway covering. A final effort to ready itself for the heat. Not that it really mattered. Once out of line with likewise faulty homes the wind found it's bearing and bore down on you from all directions it seemed like. Ample respite as the gusts jostled our clothes and wrapped around our limbs. Which was probably the only thing that seemed to happen out there. Sort of.
                We didn't always say too much, my brother and I. He had his Game boy and his own childhood imaginings to fabricate before him, pacing around that place, and so did I. It was some arcade style space ship game that became a tenant in the slot of my device. The kind where you held down the firing button and maneuvered yourself through countless waves of enemies and high score screens. But I never actually played the game when out there. Or ever really. I listened to it. The beginning screen, you know, the one that asks you to "press start", had an expansive track list. One song for each level, including the ones I'd ask my brother to beat for me. And I liked them. Listened to them. Pacing and dipping and whimsically twisting to, eyes closed. Each time trying to pick out new sounds and intricacies. Synthesizers and hi-hats, bass kicks and instrumental flurries. In flows of mandolin and receding wood block clanks. I'd listen intently, seeing the sounds swim to and fro as splashes of varying hues in paint brush strokes, growing in number as songs intensified and progressed; the Game boy as big as the head it was held up to. The device might as well have been a part of my head. I wouldn't have minded. The music was all I cared to hear. My babysitter, the whole world for that matter, could wait.