Morning after something

We were sleeping in this new room, quite a bunch of us, and I sat in a broad wooden basket weave chair, naked but for a pair of small white briefs, with an even larger flap belly than I'm used to, and with a very big bright orange shirt draped around the back of the chair and buttoned once in front of my chest. If I didn't sit in a certain way or slumped too much it felt a little confining and I worried vaguely that the button would be torn off. So I tried to button it up entirely, for there is safety in numbers, even for buttons, because shared strain is lighter strain, but alas, the shirt was too tautly stretched already and I couldn't close the it. Why is it even pulled around the back of the chair, I thought, what a pointless, idiotic thing to do. I proceeded to take it off and because there was nothing else to cover me with even this much, and I'd apparently spent the whole night sitting and reading in that chair anyway - the light had changed, something pale blue glinted though cracks in the roller blind to my right - I got up and waded through the clutter and sleeping people into the general direction of the door. I encountered some dusty hair bundles on the way that I picked up to throw away.

 

Track

The tiny children sat in their tiny cars on the little track that looked a lot like a belt conveyer in the round-angled rectangular form of those at airport luggage retrieval. The track was about half a metre high, its two longer sides maybe 3 metres, the short sides roughly 2 metres long.

An enthusiastic father counted down and opened the race.

They didn't move. Not even one of them started driving, not one.

I, a spectator, turned around to my friends and said something along the lines of: "The children should do this for their own amusement, because they want to, and not because their fathers like it so much. That's stupid."

Then I turned back to face the track and to have my own fun. A friend of mine ("Sid", who actually exists) jumped onto the track and started running on it, and I counted his rounds and cheered him on, also admonishing him not to cut the corners by jumping over them. It was basically hilarity. Until Sid fell and injured his heel. He kept grinning though and said it wasn't bad. He was carried off by medics anyway, well, not carried off, just lifted to be carried away, and then I found it very appropriate how he wasn't Sid anymore, but Nikola (a girl from my high school), who was kind of an athlete. She said something about the injury, was laid back down on the track, which was now in a foresty park by a big old red brick house (a nice one, I think it was a proper villa) - and I have no idea why, but I started undressing her. While I went to work on her I caught a glimpse of my own left arm; I was wearing a camouflage army jacket and on my left upper arm was a dark blue-grey badge in nearly hexagonal shape, if I remember correctly, like a stylised shield maybe, and with a single, simple dark symbol in dark lines, framed by another dark line in the shape of the badge itself. The symbol looked roughly like a square with a lever on each side, or a twodimensional box with hooks, or a - well, I'm not entirely certain of its design anymore.