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 Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2014 12:28 pm
Lesson
It wasn’t that he didn’t understand the classes, he had always shown an aptitude for knowledge and picked up what the teacher was trying to instruct with little effort. He was even more adept at learning from demonstration, able to mimic with uncanny efficiency. What had always held him back, at least according to the tutors he was sent to was a complete lack of motivation.
Presented with a problem he was apt to ask why he needed to do it at all and neither threats nor rewards seemed to have traction on him. He would choose inaction or some other activity almost every time. The things they wanted him to do made no sense, they had no discernable application in his world, a world completely separate from the one around him. He learned but time and time again when it came to tests, he failed. Except to him it had not registered in any way as failure, in his youth failure and success had no abstract or tangible form to him, it made no difference to him if his mother cried or he was denied some sustenance or input just as it made no difference if he was given sweets or time to play.
Play he did not understand either, the concept that he should do some strange rambling noisy thing was alien. The other children seemed to do it just fine, but to him it was as chaotic as the swirl of water in a foamy sink. Left to his own devices he imitated or he organized, sorting all of his possessions into neat rows according to size. Sometimes he would just repeat the same gesture incessantly because it gave him some odd pleasure, a flash of encouragement in his thoughts. This made his mother cry too.
He understood lessons but he did not understand people. There was no class on why people smiled sometimes, what a smile was, what it meant. There was no class on why the little boy had cried when he had pinched his arm till it bled, there was no class on all the confusing things around him. They expected him to know and treated him like he was stupid or broken because he did not. But when those same children stumbled over clear and obvious writing problems, they coaxed and coddled them.
His first lesson was that the world did not like him and would never cater to him.
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Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2014 12:39 pm
Cruelty
“Why did you do it?” his mother had veered off from her usual calm patience. Something sparkled in her eyes, something lively and frantic. It was beautiful, like stars far away.
He did not change his expression, looking down at the crumpled and broken baby squirrels. None of them moved, contorted into impossible positions. They were beautiful too. “I don’t know.” he said. And he didn’t know. Why did anyone do anything? No one asked him why he yawned or why he blinked, why he put his hands together to make pleasing shapes. He had simply laid the creatures out like he’d lay out his toys.
“You can’t do that.” his mother said, shaky, still sparkling. “You killed them. They were alive and now they will not be alive again. It was cruel.”
Alive. Why was it considered better for them to be alive than like this? They were beautiful like this, before they had been too quick, too loud and too ugly. “Cruel?” he asked.
“You had no reason to hurt them. You need to be gentle with them.”
So if he had reason it would be acceptable? He tried reason with her.
“Then I hurt them because they were not...they were not nice.”
Again her voice quavered. “NO. No Lawrence! You can’t do that! You can’t hurt things. Its wrong! Be kind. Be gentle. I’ve told you before. So many times. So many. No more.”
He blinked at her and his blank uncomprehending stare seemed to break her.
“Please.” she said, tears spilling free.
“Yes mother.” he said, but only to make her stop.
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Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2014 12:58 pm
Winter
The snow was thick on the ground, the trees bare black talons reaching towards the pale sky. Their footsteps tramped across the untrodden snow.
“Jan, wait up!” called a woman’s voice, he waited, his breath clouding in the air.
Maja was carrying little Mikael against her chest in a carrier, both of them bundled up tightly in layer upon layer of clothing. She was a little out of breath and it settled on her cheeks in a bright rosy sort of glow.
“This is where I meant.” he said with a well practiced smile, gesturing out over a veiw that laid bare a large frozen lake, children were skating down by one of the houses far away, an old man watching over them. She made her way to his elbow and took it. The smile softened. “Familiar?” he asked.
“I knew it before we even arrived.” she said. “This is where you brought me on that first date. The picnic was a disaster!” He laughed airily. “A lot of things in life are disasters, it wasn’t my fault that the ants got into everything.” Those ants were mercifully long gone.
He eyed the children skating. “Just think, one day we can bring Mik here. He can learn to skate.”
“Maybe you can too.” Maja said with a playful grin. “I remember a certain someone saying he couldn’t skate at all.”
“I prefer swimming.” he said haughtily.
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Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2014 1:09 pm
Anger
“So I told him that it was no returns.”
“So I told him that it was no returns.”
His father was talking about his day, and again at the dinner table he was imitating him, in gesture, inflection and tone. He did not notice the way the others at the table froze, or if he did, he didn’t care.
He stopped only when a salt shaker was levelled at his head from across the table, rebounding with a painful thud that made him see stars. He looked over in bafflement as the man got to his feet.
“LARRY YOU LITTLE s**t” he roared, “******** STOP THIS s**t.” Lawr rubbed his head and raised a brow. And suddenly his mother was on her feet. They were arguing, his dad bellowing about how he hadn’t asked for a retard, how he just wanted a normal boy. His siblings were looking at him. He was not uncomfortable short of the throbbing pain in his head.
“Be gentle.” he said, echoing his mother's words before standing and indifferently excusing himself from the dinner table, leaving the sound of yelling and tears behind him as he returned to his room.
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Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2014 1:29 pm
Book
Paradise Lost she read, running her fingertips over the gold writing stark against the red leather.
“Don’t touch that.” he said and his voice was sharper and colder than she’d ever heard it.
She put the tome down and he retrieved it as if it was made of solid gold. “It is off limits.”
Every day more and more things were off limits.
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Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2014 1:44 pm
Asphyxiation
He still thought about her every day. It was a simple fact of his existence. Wake up. Think about her, shower, think about her, skincare, think about her and the same dreadful routine the entire day until he went to sleep. It was a blight, relentless and obtrusive and he felt sometimes as if he was a point of silence sandwiched between the constant sound of Butch’s voice and the silent but ever-present weight of America’s existence. She wanted nothing to do with him, satisfied with the life she’d built on the island, but that did not stop the thoughts, if anything it made them worse.
Sometimes he would go out to the towns and simply stand there in the dark, staring at the distant lights of the place where she was. When she was gone, off island or somewhere else he felt it, more obsessive and reclusive than usual. It was terrible, an uncomfortable restlessness that was not emotion but something far deeper, the tug that made nocturnal creatures pace their confines over and over at night.
He dwelled sometimes on how her fingers had felt around his throat, and on occasion in his distant way, he considered if she should have finished the job then and there. Both of them would have died, it would have been neat, there would be none of this prolonged discomfort, unable to even wrangle a conversation from her to take the edge off for a moment.
Her hands were no longer at his throat but he was still suffocating.
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Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2014 2:18 pm
Applause
He bowed and there was another swell of applause from the audience. He couldn’t see them, the house lights were too bright on the stage, they were a swimming horde of faceless shapes out there in the dark. Somehow inferior to the too-real bright world on the stage. This was the only place that anyone seemed to think that his ability to imitate things that he did not feel was a good thing. Here he made them feel, pulled their strings and they thanked him for it. Off stage he was expected to be able to keep his false face on at all times and was harshly punished when he did not.
It was a place where he could receive due respect, a perfect moment where the foolish crowds of his peers would think that he wasn’t so bad, that maybe he was normal like them, that he had to feel the things he said to be able to say them so well.
But even this sanctuary he knew wouldn’t last, he could not take it further because all it ever brought was more eyes, more people aware of your face and your name. He would have to leave it behind, depart the stage and never return. He would have to make the world outside his stage, there would be no applause there and every name would be his stage name.
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