Children of the Sky (Chapter 4)

Readers: I would advise that before you read this you should read Children of the Sky chapeters 1, 2, and 3 if you have not already done so. Then this chapter should make a lot more sense that it would if you just read it alone.

Neopolitan woke early to the sounds of a baby crying. He grumbled to himself, "Aww, Jose, shut up, will you?" But of course, the screams went on. Jose Navidad was the toddler boy of the young couple that lived right upstairs. Although he appeared very cute and cherubic, trying to sleep at night with his bedroom just a thin celing away was nearly impossible to do. Also, his behavior was quite devilish. One day his mother Maria Ana wanted to give her kitchen cabinets a thorough scrubbing, inside and out. This task hadn't been done in years because she had always been preoccupied with something else. But, luckily, it was labor day, which the stressed out mother upstairs had off from her full-time job as a produce manager in the local market. She placed little Jose outside on the postage-stamp-sized front lawn in front of the apartment building. This was a sad excuse for the local park, also. All of the children in the apartment building as well as the families from the abutting buildings gathered in this patch of withered yellow lawn for weekend recration. There was a battered swingset and a se-saw composed of an old plastic paint bucket and a wooden board. The mutt, Rover, a skinny brown animal that belonged to the 3rd story apartment renters, lived tied out in front on the lawn. The family usually forgot to feed Rover and he lived off scraps of bread tossed to him by Neopolitan himself out of his window, just to make the dog's incessant howling cease. Obviously, this area was not a very quiet place to sleep at night. Neither was it considered a relaxing haven during the day. Anyhow, when Maria Ana placed Jose out in the lawn, he finger painted all afternoon and wiped the excess blobs of green and yellow paint on Neopolitan's cat Russo. "The little brat's screams actually seem to be coming from the front stoop now," thought Neopolitan. With that, he ripped his worn cotton sheets off and stepped into his straw sandals. The tile floor was too cold to walk around the tiny apartment, especially in the morning.
Swinging open the front door, Neopolitan gasped at what he saw in front of him on the brick steps. It was a little baby boy, adorable and chubby, and certainly not Jose! This baby was wrapped up in a pastel blue blanket, too.
As Neopolitan looked down at the boy's face, the youngster suddenly swung his head forward, exposing his scalp and the first few sprouts of fiery blonde hair on it. "OWWWWWWWWWWW!" Neopolitan winced in pain and backed up, as the result of looking at these fiery hairs on the boys head was his eyeballs burned as if he had looked up at the Sun himself.
Finally, after running a damp hankie over his face, Neopolitan settled down from the shock and pain of his eyeballs.
"You...must be my b-brother," the withered old man muttered to the boy. "You have come from the Sun, also, I suspect. No one else could have hair like that and be of earthly parents."
Today in Mexico it was not QUITE as cloudy as it had been the day before. A few weak rays of sunlight reached out behind some dull gray clouds like long, graceful fingers, and their comforting heat caressed the baby boy as he lay on the cool pavers of the front porch that led to his elder brother's home.
Neopolitan stooped down, which was becoming harder and harder to do in his old age, and retrieved the baby boy. Then he walked into the house, gently closing the door behind him with his free hand.
In the kitchen, he lay the baby boy down on the immaculately clean wooden table as he opened his refrigirator door with a quick swing. He found a pitcher of whole milk, heated it one the stove, and gave it to the baby. Then, he started to look for some bananas that would be mushy and ripe enough to make into some kind of a decent baby food, because he was not that rich, living in an apartment, to buy canned baby food at the open air market. Besides, it would be hard to even figure out what brand to get, since everything was labeled in spanish. Although Neopolitan had lived in Mexico for a very long time, the old man only spoke English fluently. Yes, he also had the language of the Sky well-leared in the back of his head somewhere too.
The baby crawled to the edge of the table and almost fell off onto the hard kitchen floor. Gasping of relief as he again scooped the little bundle up, the man started to talk to his baby brother.
"Ohhh, you are sooo cute! Yes,you are, yups! You are certainly not the child of any local hispanic, for you have golden tanned skin and fiery hair. Your eyes are the same color as the blanket you have come with, pale blue, like the Sky. You came with no note, no explanation, but I already love you and will take care of you, for you are one of me. YOu are in fact my kin."