Villa

It was pity, I later decided. 

It was a wonder that their tattered ball didn't disintegrate at each pass, each kick. They could have easily mended it, I mused, judging by the scraps of clothes already at hand presently dangling limply from their emaciated frames.

I often watched during my work breaks. I'd just picked up a new patio chair that gave splendid support as I gazed over the cityscape from my balcony. Five floors atop a hill were enough to provide a viewer with a full panorama of town, from the docks to the chapel up the way. I'd used my vantage point once to inform a courier to avoid a crowd of protestors on his semiweekly grocery delivery. Those dreck with signs and curled papers again, amplifying their existences upon the only stage that would take them. I suppose alleys and gutters do provide for the acoustics.

My work was that of a calling, of an arrival of a great species, documented but seldom seen, and even more rarely cultivated. When it came, it took doors off hinges, it corrupted the pure and saved the hopeless. To describe my role as its scribe is as misleading a title as it would be to call a recipe an instruction manual. Yes, the words are there, but to craft it into a haven for the senses takes an iron will, steel nerves, and a bosomous sensitivity.

It rewarded its scribes well, as my abode would show. Imported afghans, white-leather plush sofa, marbled countertops and polished shelves. As resplendent as could be achieved before the inquisitors burst through my door with the heresy articles and comparisons to Paradise. It did well to surround one with totems of great events, slivers of cavern-deep encounters and worldly experiences that one shudder to imagine the life that had forged such tokens of the gallant ethos. Tokens, of course, obtained at bazaars and traveling merchants' kiosks. I didn't travel much; I couldn't risk leaving this bastion of mine to the city and its ways. I would have no one to look after the place, after all. My brother finally misheard his calling in life and went off with that Spanish woman I'd warned him about for years. Ironic, isn't it, that he doesn't write me so to be bathed in the tender wisdom of my response.

Throughout the day, I would take breaks upon my balcony, watching as the villagers below would amble through their days. They sure were a relaxed people, to sum up their faults. I wondered how many could actually read, let alone read any of my work. It made me smile, really, thinking of their reactions had they just to learn of who they were lucky enough to live just below, whose breaths on summer nights lilted down to perfume their dreamless slumbers. 

In the evenings, as the semi-garbed children gathered up their ball, which was still round in defiance of all physical knowledge, they would look back up at me with something in their eyes.