2

 

   Pacing, his eyes were drawn to the raindrops racing on the window, and

he stared dully till he stopped seeing them.

    He saw instead a small boy, sitting on the floor. The image grew clearer

and began moving. An adult was bending over the boy, talking to him

impatiently, looking around every once in a while at the other kids playing

loudly near them. He wanted the boy to stop sulking, to get up and play

with the others... He was a middle-aged man, portly, with liver spots

appearing on his medium-dark skin. His small, graying goatee wobbled as

he spoke. The boy stared at the ground stubbornly, his pale face clenched

against the tremble of his lip. He was nine, but small for his age,

fine-boned and fair-haired. His eyes seemed black in his face, fierce in the

determination not to cry, not to cry...

    Pacing near the rain-battered window, he realized the eyes were his, the

face was his. He remembered very suddenly and very vividly the moment

depicted, and laughed at how easily he'd been upset. It was ridiculous,

really.

    Someone knocked on the door. It was a hard, abrupt noise, and he knew

instinctively it did not belong to a local. Was Neric here, somehow, for an

unknown or impossible reason? The knock came again, with the same

fast-paced impatience. It was not Neric. It was the authorities, he knew it,

he had known it... they had caught him with something he couldn't slither

out of, and now this beautiful wilderness and the dreams it encircled would

be lost to him forever, and he would not believe it, he could not!

    They became more rough, more persistent. His face was clenched still

against the eyes, his black eyes, which jerked from exit to exit in noiseless

nervousness, much as a fish flails on the end of a line. And there was a

numbing, eery silence, despite the growing tumult from the entry that

deafened and physically pushed him-- unnatural silence, weeping,

intensifying, piercing his eardrums. He could not bear it, he would not!

    They kicked the door open and all ceased, drowning peacefully in

white-hot, overwhelming brilliance.

    He woke up. The sun was in his eyes, and he was still just damp enough

to be uncomfortable, but he lay on the couch a while longer to watch the

clouds roll away. A part of him had been left pacing in his dream, where

the rain beat in rivulets against the glass.

    Changing his clothes, he briefly considered suicide. After all, his

fatalistic side snickered, you can't hide forever.

    But the idea of true nonexistence frightened him, and he stopped.

    He slipped on a dry pair of shoes and ran blindly out the door and into

the humming maze of garbage and scrap metal that formed the junkyard.

Reviews

[Flarare Weet]

I love the vivid detail expressed in the writing.