Mariko, She was born on a rubbish tip........

MARIKO

A child was born on a rubbish tip. Its mother was the shell of an old broken fridge and her father was a rusty old pick up truck.
Her name was Mariko-san and she had thick black curly hair, golden-brown skin, eyes like glorious stars and a little mouth like a rose-bud.
When she smiled, which was most of the time, her face was a garden of beautiful flowers. When she cried, which was not very often, little silver tears fell from her eyes and watered the garden of her face. Soon her sorrow would pass and the garden of her smile would open all its petals even wider to the bright yellow son that danced and sparkled on the discarded television sets, the mangled wheels of ancient prams and bicycles, the mountains of cans and bottles and stinking, rotting garbage that was Mariko's home.

Mariko's playmates were other little children who also lived on the rubbish heap, but her best friend was an old black doll with only one leg and one eye missing and a hole in her skull. It wore a dirty old cotton dress with faded pink roses on it and pale green leaves. Most of its hair was missing. Mariko's dress was also cotton, just as dirty, but had yellow butterflies little green caterpillars. Mariko would talk to her little black doll for hours on end, tying bits of ragged ribbon to its straggling locks of hair and looking through the rubbish for scraps of cast off cloths and jewellery for it to wear.
One day she found a necklace of chipped green glass. It looked very pretty on the little black doll but eventually the string holding the bits of glass together broke, which made Mariko cry.
One day a big machine came to the rubbish tip and picked up Mariko's mother and father in its cruel metal claw - it carried them up in the air and dropped them onto a pile of other broken fridges, washing machines, micro-waves, cars, bits of machinery, iron fencing and sheets of twisted metal. Then another machine came and pressed all the pieces of rubbish including Mariko's mother and father into a small metal cube.
The noise of screeching metal was terrible and Mariko put her hands over the ears of her dollie so it would not have to listen
Many of the other children's parents were also crushed into small metal cubes and some of them started to cry. Mariko pulled them away from the terrible machines in case they came to crush them too.

Life was very difficult at times. The growing children had to fight the hungry rats and birds for scraps of food, and always they had to be careful of the cruel machines and their terrible claws.
New rubbish arrived everyday, and with it new children. Not all of them survived, some were cut by broken glass or cans and their wounds became infected. Some were buried beneath the land slips of rain soaked garbage and filth. Some of the very young were eaten alive by the rats.
Naturally the older ones tried to look after the new arrivals as much as possible, and of courser there was always new parents arriving on the big ugly dumpster trucks.
But eventually the cranes and crushing machines would come and they would be collected up and compressed into the tiny metal cubes and taken away again to be sold for money.
Mariko didn't have any money , but she knew it was essential for the people who lived in the city of steel and glass that shimmered in the distant heat-haze of the horizon.
The machines came from the city and one day Mariko knew she must travel there to fulfil her destiny. Of course, Mariko was only a child and knew nothing of "destiny" but she had the feeling in her bones and in her heart, as sure as the King Rat had feelings for the choicest cut of the rubbish and the tenderest piece of garbage.