Free Ishmael Toffee by Roger Smith

through Ishmael when he walks in, not bothering to greet him. Ishmael grabs some drinks from the fridge and carries them over to the counter. There are chips and pink sausages and some apples wrinkled like Ishmael behind the glass counter, and he tells the man what he wants.
    The man takes his time to put it all in a bag and make change and Ishmael wants to tell him to hurry his fat ass up, but he says nothing, just keeps checking back that nobody’s coming in at him through the door.
    At last the fatso,  moving like he’s swimming though oil, hands a pink plastic bag through the bars and Ishmael hustles out, whistling for the girly who ducks in next to him and they take off down the road on the border of Paradise Park and Tin Town.
    Ishmael hears a chorus of voices yapping like dogs. First he thinks they’re in his head, but then he and the kid turn a corner and he checks out the mob, ten deep, crowding round a minibus taxi stalled on the road to Tin Town.
    The taxi driver sticks his skinny arm out the window and he’s holding a gun, shining silver in the sun. Before can use the thing the mob is all over him and they drag him out of his seat and he goes under like he’s drowning in this mess of human rubbish.
    The co-driver scrambles out the passenger window—can’t open the door against the bodies—and lands on the mob like he’s stage diving. He crowd surfs and almost makes it to the road before he goes under, too.
    The men, armed with sticks and pipes and bits of sharpened metal, tear open the sliding door of the taxi and pull people out. Ishmael understands what this is all about when he hears them chanting, mad as meth-monsters on a Monday morning:  “Little Cindy! Little Cindy!”
    The men haul out a woman who clutches a child to her tits. Small child— girl—with dreadlocks the color of beer.
    “Little Cindy! Little Cindy!” they shout as they drag the child from the woman, thinking they got half a mil in their paws.
    Just when it looks like the kid’s gonna get ripped apart like a chicken take-out, there’s the whoop of a siren. A cop truck bounces up and the men scatter like lice, disappearing into the houses and onto the dump.
    The woman, bleeding from her mouth and knees, grabs for the kid who sits on its ass in the dust and howls seven kinds of hell at the sky. The kid is as colored as Ishmael, just a mixed-race brat whose white daddy got it on with some hot brown meat.
    Ishmael takes the girly’s hand and hurries them down a narrow street, keeps them walking fast, pulling her along when she falls behind, ducking away from people. He needs to get them a place to hide, till it gets dark. He sees white crosses sticking up over a tumbled down wall and hurries the girly on toward the graveyard.
    When Ishmael hears the commotion, people shouting, he’s ready to turn and get them out of there. Then he sees maybe fifty darkies in bright red jumpsuits, with red helmets and black gumboots, pushing people out of the shacks built in the cemetery, pathetic piles of belongings dumped amongst the crosses.
    They call them Red Ants, these darkies, private security guards brought in to throw out squatters. Some of the people from the shacks try to fight back, and the Ants get stuck into them with whips and nightsticks and their boots.
    So Ishmael doesn’t run. Thinks: no wait Ishmael, this here’s a gap you can take. These people are too busy with their problems to be worrying about your stinking ass.
    Ishmael takes the kid’s hand and walks along the graveyard wall and through a hole, into a quiet place where no squatters have built their shacks.
     
    ●
     
    They hide behind a scary grave, the stone cracked and leaning like something horrible is pushing it up from under the ground. Cindy didn’t want to come into the graveyard, and the little man had to get down and look into her eyes and tell her, “The dead they only got problems with bad people, hear? They don’t trouble with good people like