Mushroom Antennas

Television antennas rise up from individual roofs like mushrooms after the rain one day.

They come in all kinds of colours—a pale white that seems rather redundant considering the weather; a shiny, expensive black that looks like the rare limousine that honks its narcissistic horn as it shuttles down the road; but the one that catches everyone’s eyes is a deep, rusty red. It is red like dried blood on the train tracks, brown like the rust on the handles of the kitchen knives, and somehow, it is both of these colours and neither of them.

Everyone is envious, but no one has any words to speak into life, because no one knows who lives under the roof that installed that. Tavish is envious too, because he cannot have one of those antennas—neither the white, black, nor the rusty red one—because he does not have the money for it yet.

The children down the street laugh at him for that. They call him the silliest names that he dare not repeat in front of his mother, for fear that she’d grip him by both his ears like the handlebars of her old pink bike with a flowery basket in the front, and worse, spin him around violently like Mishmish does because she can’t grip them both at the same time yet.

But still, TV antennas continue to sprout up on the roofs of their neighbourhood like mushrooms after the rain. And still, Tavish doesn’t have enough money for one of those too.