The Boy In Chains

Another entity in my garden of grotesques.

I stared at him.

I stared, because I hadn't the mind to do anything else.

He did not seem to notice me. In a way, I thought, it was good that he didn't. He lay crumpled on the dirty linoleum floor, bleeding where his rusty manacles rubbed skin. It was rather disgusting, I admit, how his skin seemed not only to chafe but to rot, leaking ichor alongside blood and pus. His hair was a tangle of long, blood-shocked strands that clung to his face, neck, and shoulders. He lay motionless, broken on the ground, head bowed. His whole form shimmered, almost as if he was a mirage. I stared at him in awe.

"Why are you in chains?" I inquired. My heart hammered wildly against my sternum with the force of Mjölnir, faster than a jackrabbit's own. Silence was his only answer. I stood. I stared. I stepped closer. "Who put you in chains?"

Again, no response. I asked again and again, repeatedly, excessively, madly, and he still gave no response. I could not see his face as of yet. I paced closer to him so that his bowed head was only two feet away from my knees. A myriad questions I flung at him, and a myriad silent breaths were his reply. At last, in a blazing column of frustration, I screamed--a hoarse, anguished screech rose from the deepest regions of my being. I screamed until I could not feel my head. I fell silent. No, rather, I fell into silence.

"What's your name?" I asked, after an eternity. His frame expanded, breathed, came to life before my eyes. His hair shimmered and shifted from one color to another as he moved. He moved to rise--his shoulder blades protruded, not unlike a cat's when it stalks its prey from tallgrass. As he got onto his knees I saw that he was naked, but in that time and being I did not care. He stood. He was incandescent. Iridescent. Completely divine.

In one moment, he looked a Bedouin--skin dark like the finest rosewood, an angel of the desert; and the next, he was an ivory sculpture of Freyr. One moment he was skin and bones and nothing more; in the next, he stood a spitting image of Apollo. I looked up. His eyes were as iridescent as the rest of his being--shifting and dancing across and within a vast spectrum of colors. And yet all this inconsistency mixed into one solitary unfathomable hue of wholeness and perfection--one that not even the blood and wounds could mar. He bore his manacles, bore his collar, bore his chains with pride and strength that I have, in all my life, never encountered.

"What's your name?" I asked again. A smile wove onto his face and he breathed in deep before releasing it again. His lips parted.

"My name..." he began. His voice was like sandpaper, hoarse and dissonant, as if he hadn't spoken in centuries. Even so, it was a timbre of deep, elegiac melody and I felt that his voice alone was the definition of music. "Is Freedom."