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.