Aliens on the Park

With skateboard tight in hand, his hair cut to the skull, he takes long drags on cigarettes, flinging each butt with an easy flick of fingers. At five feet, slim, in sockless sneakers large for a boy his size and age, lost in oversized cloths new to his adolescence, his trousers barely hang on his half exposed rear, (the latest fad), he moves impatiently back and forth, spuming cigarette smoke like whale spews mist from its blow hole, waiting for an older boy, his clone. Darkness soon smoothers the park and the boy’s clone appears and they vanish into the night puffing away on a stronger sweet-scented smoke, laughing, leaving a trail of quickly fading obscenities. About to leave, my nostrils catch a whiff of a sweet but unknown drug mixed with the scent of newly blossomed lilacs, and I quickly snort and cough it out, recalling something from my boy days not unlike an odor of premature fruit gone rotten.