Dotito is our brother
He is strange
He will not play with us on the streets.
He doesn't want to go with us to the community centre.
He doesn't want to play the hoola-hoop.
He likes to sit under the mango-tree
all day long
all alone
drawing strange things that look like people
but aren't really people.
He is at the bottom of his class
and each time we go for games
in the play-ground, he disappears.
He loves the rain.
He could walk for hours in a heavy downpour
and never notice. Father caned him for it once.
And now when it rains he just sits by the window
looking out. Sometimes talking,
opening his mouth and saying strange things
to the rain.
When he is tired of talking to the rain,
he blows breath onto the glass pane,
and draws the same weird things
on scraps of paper.
People who don't know him
think he is deaf. He isn't although we
aren't sure he won't be. Soon.
Behind the closed door of their bedroom
father and mother whisper about him in the dark,
but we aren't supposed to hear it,
we know what they have begun to think
about Dotito.
We are a little afraid.
Strange people point and stare at us in the street -
even when Dotito isn't with us.
We know what they are saying too,
even when we don't see them open their mouths.
They are talking about how we are
Dotito's people.