Jireh seemed to have some kind of sixth sense. He wasn’t even looking back over his shoulder, yet he still had a way of anticipating every move Sid made. As the smaller male approached rapidly from the rear, Jireh slowed just enough then sidestepped right and halted suddenly - letting Sid come up even with him. Dropping low, he shoved violently up and left, sending his friend flying into the kitchen cabinets. He followed the airborne Sid, bending deeper at the waist and sweeping up a leg with his thick left arm. He locked up the leg - pulling it skyward - while twisting at the waist and driving his right arm - stolen book and all - down into Sid's midsection. The smaller boy hit the floor hard, like a turtle dropped on its shell. He instinctively pulled his limbs in to try and fend off the larger boy, who was coming down on top of him.

Wedged into another corner - a physical one - where the wood of the cabinets met the tile floor, and with a laughing Jireh firmly on top of him, Sid surrendered.

"Alright," he said, pausing his struggle and trying to catch his breath. "Alright, I give!"

He knew Jireh would never be content with simple submission. There would be an additional, humiliating payment necessary to end the scuffle.

"Say Jireh's the greatest!" the victorious boy commanded.

"Not in a million years!" His rival declared, defiantly. He knew he couldn't give in right away; Jireh wouldn’t buy it.

"Say it!" His oppressor persisted.

“Fig off!” Sid cursed, growing a tad angry at his own weakness. His parents weren’t home, but he lowered his voice anyway as if they might hear the curse and punish him for it.

The use of the ancient curse “fig” widened Jireh’s grin. Sid had dropped the F-Bomb, and now all sorts of weapons were legal in response.

"Get off me you filthy ape!" Sid half-laughed and half-cried.

"Filthy ape is it?"

Soon after they met, Sid had guessed that his friend was mostly simian, due to his size and strength and just the general look of him - but with some sort of cat thrown in, which gave him his speed. There was no way to be sure, of course, until they got the results of their DNA tests, but Sid had received high marks in all of his animal husbandry classes, which gave him confidence in his assumptions.

The kids - as was custom on the planet Creat in their time - underwent DNA testing at birth, but they couldn't get the results until their last year at school. This was supposed to keep them from picking on each other - as if children couldn't find plenty of reasons to pick on one another - and being curious, like most kids, they naturally tried to figure out what their tests had said. Some even placed bets on the results of those tests.

Most kids had a good idea of their own lineage, based on that of their parents. Sid's mom, for instance, was a pure-bred canine; doberman to be exact. His father was also canine, though the exact breeds that made up that side of his family weren’t as clear. His father was a mutt, and therefore, so was Sid.

Jireh's mother was simian, and so was his father - orangutans both - which gave their son his flaming orange locks and long arms. Somewhere in the older boys lineage – Sid guessed – there was a lion in the wood pile, as the expression went. There had to be. Nothing else adequately explained his reflexes. He was also unnaturally tall for an orangutan, and still growing. Whether or not his height advantage would continue after puberty remained to be seen. Either way, he seemed to be more than just a big, hairy ape, though without being sure, Sid was forced to corral his insults toward the larger boy to just those of the simian variety. Even that had limits. Sid had called him monkey boy once and had accidentally found the line that he shouldn't ever cross with Jireh.

He would never do that again.

For the most part, though, the big ape was harmless and fun loving toward his friends. He loved teasing and pranks - Sid being the target of most of them, as was the case now.

He leaned his head over the cowering, smaller boy, allowing a long string of spittle to snake out of his mouth. Sid couldn't move his head far enough to get out from under the clear glob hovering over him.

"That's gross, don't you dare," he protested, in the manner of one who has been thoroughly bested but is still resigned to save at least a little face. Jireh allowed the glob to drop a few centimeters, then sucked it back up.

“It’s been a while since you paid homage to the Lord of Spittle,” the older boy taunted, and let the glob descend once again.

Sid knew that resistance was pointless, and as much as he hated losing face, it was only to Jireh, and he could handle that. Besides, the last time his friend had let the Spittle Lord loose it had gotten away from him and ended up on Sid’s upper lip – a mishap the younger boy would do just about anything to keep from happening again.

"Stop! Alright! Jireh's the greatest!" He laughed.

The glob withdrew, and Jireh was soon laughing with him. He stood, pulling Sid to his feet.

“Loogy, Lord of Saliva, thanks you for your continued patronage!” He said, thoroughly amused. "When will you learn?" He asked, clapping Sid hard on the shoulder.

"One of these days I'll get lucky!" Sid hoped, shoving Jireh toward the door. Jireh faked a punch to Sid's stomach making him flinch and double over, then smacked him on the head with the stolen book for good measure. He tossed the tome onto the kitchen counter, careful to stay between it and his word-hungry friend, then they both laughed again and wrestled their way out onto the back deck.

Mycah and I followed.

“Spittle Lord, Mycah!?! What was that!?!” I asked, wondering how these boys could call themselves friends. Their world was strange to me. They were strange to me. Their behavior was certainly strange to me.

“Surely you and your siblings partook of the occasional round of horseplay when you were growing up, didn’t you, Ravenna?”

“We never spit on each other!”

“No, but your childhood – should you look back on it – was not so different. You may find that it is only the fog of the forty years since that make youthful exuberance seem so foreign to your eyes.”

He was right, of course – pausing time and giving me a moment to reflect on those distant memories. My sister and I had trapped our younger brother under a wash basin for two hours, once – sitting on it, kicking it, and refusing to let him out from under it. The experience had given him a severe case of claustrophobia that lasted the rest of his life. “How could I have forgotten that?” I wondered aloud.

“The fog of time and self-protection encloses your kind in funny little bubbles of half-truth and fantasy.” He said, as if he was aware of exactly which childhood memory my inner eye had settled on. “We will need to pop those bubbles, at some point.”

“Why do I feel like we just popped one?”

He did not respond, turning his wrist and starting Time flowing, once again.