Day thirteen - Waiting on a sunny day

In trying to remember things that are now decades old there are some things that have been surprising me of late, and increasingly so, as I ponder these long gone years. It's not unsurprising that I can't perfectly recall some things, what surprises me is that when I look back I can't even remember the names of many of the kids I used to play with. Mostly they'd be kids from my building or the building adjacent to mine, but I remember some other kids that used to hang out where we lived and they were either from the neighbourhood or from even across the (admittedly) tiny town we lived in back then. Some of these kids I knew better than others - they were all mostly older than me, and would be in the same age range as my brother, who's three years older than me. I don't think I could've called any of them my friends, and there were no real enmities there - except with an idiot kid I always disliked called Marco. This thug of a boy was the bane of my early life, moreso than a pair I'll eventually write about, and one of my earliest humiliations came at his feet, or more literally, his foot : in a sort of baseball game we kids used to play, I got into a verbal fight with this kid and out of nowhere he just kicked me in the mouth. That left me fuming, and for the duration of the time we lived in that place, I plotted a revenge that never came for years on end. When my parents told us that we were moving to another place, I imagined myself on my parent's car as we were leaving for the last time, and as the car drove past stupid Marco, I'd open the window, and throw stones at him, cracking his giant head and leaving him bleeding on the street. None of this, sadly, ever came to pass.

I remember a couple of families that lived in the building right next to mine - one of them was a mixed race family, and they had three kids : a girl, who was their eldest, and two kids who would be roughly the same age as me and my brother. We were frinedly with them, as kids go, but I don't think we ever really liked them. Their parents were complicated folks, they fought a lot - like epic shouting matches that everyone in the neighbourhood could hear. I'm very sure the guy was a piece of shit who was up to no good - It wasn't uncommon for his wife to be waiting in front of the building for him, only for her to berate him and then proceed to beat the hell out of him. Eventually the guy cracked, and mid-afternoon one day, as we kids were on the street playing or doing kid's stuff, the elder sister emerged from out of the building completely naked, crying and shouting that their dad had gone crazy and tried to kill them.

No one actually died, but shortly thereafter no one ever saw them again.