|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 12:11 am
Here is the as of yet unedited version of the first chapter of this thing that I'm doing. Enjoy.
I walked down the over lit hallway, feeling the fluttering effects of anxiety in my stomach. It was my twenty fifth birthday last week and my personalized serum had come in just yesterday. My friend, Terry, was waiting outside and had already gone through the procedure three times; this was my first. A nurse led me through the hospital’s hallways until we came to a room where a deeply tanned doctor was standing beside a plastic orange chair, which was placed across the room from a large, complex machine.
“Mr. Warner, have a seat.” He said with a smile. I did so. “It says here that this is your first cycle,” He said as he extracted what looked like watered down orange juice from a bottle with a syringe.
“Yeah,” I said. The nervousness could be heard through my voice.
“Don’t worry about a thing, I’ve had it done four times and am due for my fifth one in about a month.” He said as he tested the needle by squirting out a small amount of fluid.
“Does it hurt, doc?” I asked before I realized how childish the question must sound.
“You may experience some mild discomfort. It’ll probably feel a lot like growing pains you may have had before.” He said and stuck the needle into my arm. “But that’s later, for now it’ll be completely painless.” The fluid was pushed in to mingle with my blood. “Just wait here, I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He said and left. I could only assume that he had to wait for the liquid to dissipate throughout my body.
Over the next thirty minutes I watched construction going on outside the window, across the street. The only notice that I took of the fluid that had been introduced to my system was a slight tingling sensation that started at the puncture wound for the needle and eventually spread everywhere else. Almost as if on cue, the doctor came in at the exact moment that the last unaffected part of my body, my right pinky toe, began to tingle.
“How’re you feeling?” The doctor asked when he came back in.
“I’m alright,” I said, absent-mindedly.
“No. I mean what are you feeling?” He asked and I realized what he meant.
“Oh! The tingling you mean?”
“Right,”
“Well, it’s…tingly. I guess.”
“How far has it spread?” He asked as if he had a great deal of patience at his disposal.
I considered a moment and took one last mental stock of the feeling before answering. “Everywhere.”
“Good, just step into the activation unit and we’ll be all done.” He said, indicating the machine on the other side of the room with his hands. I did as he asked and he shut the heavy door slowly. For about five seconds nothing happened, and then previously unseen, burningly bright blue lights turned on. They covered all the interior walls of the machine, including the ceiling. The circular floor beneath my feet lit up brightly as well. They all stayed lit up for about thirty seconds, during which it became blaringly hot inside the mechanism. Just when I thought that I couldn’t take the sweltering heat any more, the lights turned off. A few seconds later the door opened and I stepped out, taking in a huge gulp of the cool hospital air.
“All done, Mr. Warner. You need to schedule a checkup for every other week for the next six months. If you start to notice any odd symptoms come see me immediately, got it?”
I felt lightheaded but got all of what the doctor said. I forced myself to regain enough composure to tell him that I understood. He gave me information on what symptoms to expect, so that I’d know if I needed to come see him as he led me back to the waiting room.
“Like I said before, it’ll feel a lot like growing pains you might’ve had as a kid; the worst’ll probably be in the legs. Most people report having a degree of a**l leakage; so expect that as well. There might also be some disorientation due to the rapid change in stature, don’t worry about that either. The worst you can probably expect is some insomnia, but that should pass within the first few weeks.” We arrived at the waiting room. “Any questions?”
The only question that came to mind was whether or not any of this was safe, but I didn’t ask it. In stead, I just shook my head; he patted me on the shoulder good-naturedly and walked back down the hall.
“You ready?” Terry walked up to me and asked. I pointed over towards the receptionists’ desk, trying to tell him that I needed to schedule an appointment, the lightheadedness from before was so bad at this point that I felt like I would pass out.
“Gotta-“ I said slurredly, trying to articulate the right words.
“You can do that over the phone,” He said, apparently able to tell what I was talking about. “I don’t think you’d be able to handle it right now, anyway.” He proceeded to lead me out of the hospital. I tried to tell him that I could take care of it myself, but the right words were lost to me. His car was black and red, and was currently wedged in between a two much larger vehicles. He got into the driver’s side and I somehow managed to stumble my way into the passenger’s. My legs were cramped, my knees coming up almost to my shoulders, but he looked right at home in the little car. You see, Terry was seventy-seven, but he looked six.
Turritopsis Nutricula, a species of hydrozoa that is, for all intents and purposes, immortal. It matures into a sexually mature state, then reverts back to infancy, then repeats. Seemingly until either the end of time or until it dies from some cause other than old age. It was this animal that unlocked one of mankind’s greatest aspirations, immortality.
Extensive studies were done over a period of several decades, attempting to replicate the effects that the Turritopsis Nutricula produces naturally. After about thirty years of research, a pig was successfully reverted to an infant state; unfortunately, the reverse aging didn’t stop there. The pig died a few weeks after the experiment was deemed a success. It had the outward appearance of a fetus when it was pronounced dead.
About a year after that, the process was perfected to the point that it was deemed safe for human testing. The human test was a complete success with no unexpected complications. It was deemed safe as a medical treatment for certain conditions, such as missing limbs, which were found to grow back as a person “youthed” which was it came to be publicly known as, the opposite of aging. Three years after it became common practice for limb regeneration, underground practices began to take place, in which healthy individuals were reverted back to around five years of age, any younger and the subjects were found to begin losing memories. The motives of these first individuals remains unclear, though it is usually thought that they wanted it for what it later became used for, which was a freedom from aging, a type of immortality. There were many outspoken advocates against the procedure, claiming that it was unnatural, unethical, and against God’s will. All of the people who were against it, though, eventually died of old age or other causes. The oldest living human on the planet, now, is two hundred and fifty. They currently have the outward appearance of a child of about twelve. There have so far been no reported side effects and doctors say there is no reason that he would die any time soon.
As is to be expected, child sized products are now a lot more common than they were a few hundred years ago. The market is just about divided in half between child sized and adult sized items for just about every purpose.
An unexpected side effect of this immortality, the fact that it’s impossible to bear, and hard to raise a child while you have the body of one has brought the global population down to roughly a quarter of what it was when it was when it was considered a problem.
The light-headedness peaked and waned on the drive back to my house. Terry informed me that the feeling was normal and that if I went inside and rested that everything would feel fine in a few hours. I said that I’d see him later, able to manage speech at that point, fell on my bed as soon as I got into my house and was asleep before I knew that it had happened. The next morning, I woke up, feeling exactly as I had before the procedure, which was what I had been expecting. I probably wouldn’t notice any real changes for a while.
I took a shower, shaved, put on some clean clothes and left for work. Terry and me, both, worked on an assembly line in a factory that manufactured bottles; the quality control department. The job was repetitive and boring, but required just enough attention so that you couldn’t zone out. The eight hours a day dragged on for what usually seemed twice that long.
As I got into my gray pickup, I remarked that I’d have to sell it in a few months and get a smaller car. That was fine with me, as long as the salesman didn’t try to rip me off. Their capacity to rob people of their hard earned cash and still sleep at night was a cause of constant annoyance to me.
The drive through town was pretty uneventful. I saw two children who obviously weren’t really children shouting at each other next to a wreck between a small red and white car and a small black and gold car. The child-sized cars were typically much more stylized than any of their larger counterparts. Their tiny wheels stuck out from the main body of the car, which was typically much more rounded than an adult-sized car. The storage space in a child-sized car was also almost nonexistent. There was enough room to take home a few weeks worth of groceries at the most.
I arrived at work, clocked in, and waited. Terry arrived three minutes later, and production started five minutes later still. Throughout the day, I asked him questions about what was going to happen during the six months in between the routine checks; durability tests, pressure tests, and the like. That day, like most others, was completely uneventful.
I enjoyed the surreal look that the city got around sunset. I observed it with a smile on my face as I drove home after clocking out and putting my mandatory safety helmet on its hook. Real children were playing on their front lawns, having gotten out of school a few hours ago, while their outwardly childish parents were either watching from the porch, window, or not watching at all. Some of the strongest advocates against the immortality procedure claimed that it was psychologically damaging to a child to be raised by another child. Though, they had eventually died off as well. In recent years the amount of opposition to the procedure had plummeted so far that anyone who opposed it was viewed in the same light as the people holding cardboard signs reading that the end was near.
I arrived at my house, changed out of my work clothes, got a coke out of the fridge, (the laws on beer regulation had changed dramatically in the wake of scores of children with adult minds. There were now legal tests that had to be taken and a license obtained before one could drink alcohol. Rather than go through all that, I just drank something else) sat down in front the television, and turned on the news.
-sexual abuse after undergoing a standard age reversal procedure, posing to children as one of their own and allegedly coercing them to remove their clothing and then attempting to fondle their genitals. Luckily a security guard at the school noticed what was going on and put a stop to it. This isn’t the first-
I changed channels, looking for something else to watch. This type of thing had happened in the past and I hadn’t been fazed when hearing about it, though now it disturbed me to a degree.
There wasn’t anything good on, so I went to my bedroom to read a book I had recently checked out from the library. I had a sandwich and some chips for dinner about an hour after that. I scheduled the checkup at the doctor’s office for two weeks from the next day, and went to sleep.
Three days later, I woke up and found that I didn’t need to shave. Five or six days after that I noticed that the hair in my armpits, back, shoulders, and pubic region was slowly starting to fall out. By the time my appointment with the doctor came around, I had about half as much as usual in all these places. I mentioned it to him, just to make sure that it was normal.
“Yes, the first sign of a successful treatment is typically hair loss. Don’t worry about it.” He answered as if the speech had been rehearsed. Apparently I wasn’t the only
one who had asked. “Look at this, you’ve already grown a half an inch shorter,” He said after taking my height. It was also discovered that I had lost about a pound and a half.
About a week later, I started losing teeth and immediately called my doctor.
“Right, I forgot to mention that,” He said. There was apparently a lot that he had forgotten to mention. “That’s perfectly normal. In a few months, they’ll be replaced by baby teeth.” He said.
“Oh, thanks,”
“No problem,”
“Bye,” I said and hung up.
By the time the next appointment came around, I was almost hairless save for my head, four of my teeth were missing, and my limbs ached frequently. I got the feeling that victims of nuclear fallout must experience the same thoughts that I was having at the time; a combination of fear, embarrassment, and more than just a little regret that I had gone through with the procedure. My doctor assured me that all this was normal, however, and that things were progressing normally, just slightly faster than normal.
“You’ve got to relax, man.” Terry said one as we sat at my kitchen table, drinking cokes. He had a license to drink beer, but was unable to lawfully anyway, at least until he reached puberty again.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You never used to do that for one,” He said, pointing at my knee, which was rapidly bouncing up and down. I forced it to stop.
“I’m just really stressed out over this whole thing,” I admitted.
“That’s normal,” He said. It had begun to aggravate me that both he and my doctor said everything that was happening was normal. The last thing that I wanted was for something to go wrong, the results of complications were usually physical deformities ranging from a permanent inability to grow hair anywhere, including on the head, to having different parts of your body age at different speeds. I had seen pictures of the latter and it really looks a lot worse than it sounds.
We simultaneously sipped our respective cokes and Terry looked up over at the digital clock on my desk.
“I gotta go,” He said and stood up.
“See ya,” I responded as he walked across the room and out the door. It sounded a lot more depressed than I had intended it to. I sat there at the kitchen table for a while, looking at the wall. My thoughts were racing; running together in a series of maddeningly random phrases. In the silence I could’ve sworn that I heard the voice of my mother, father, deceased brother, and Terry saying random snatches of dialogue that were hard to even distinguish as words. My doctor had told me to expect a type of mental upheaval as the brain tissue reverted to a more immature state.
A mad thought crossed my mind; the gun in the drawer in my bedroom pressed against my temple. I told myself that I was being crazy and that if I could last a few more months that I’d be fine. Despite my best attempts, the appeal of suicide seemed to grow greater every minute. Throughout my teenage years, the same thought had occurred to me on several occasions. Each time it actually came down to pulling the trigger or stepping off the ledge back then, I had chickened out and abandoned suicidal thoughts for months before reconsidering. So, I got up, walked down the hall to my bedroom, grabbed the gun from its drawer and placed the barrel against the side of my head, thinking that I would be deterred similarly as before.
I wasn’t scared, however. The idea of ending it all actually had more appeal than ever. I squeezed the trigger and found that it wouldn’t budge; the safety was on. The realization of what could’ve just happened did scare me, however. I quickly and roughly put the gun back into it’s drawer, lay down feeling shocked, turned out the light, and deeply rethought the situation.
Twice more that night I pulled the gun back out of it’s drawer and placed against my head with the intent to kill. Each time I had remembered to take the safety off but was too scared to actually pull the trigger. I actually cried a little after the last one, and don’t remember stopping, just waking up the next morning.
A sort of reverse growth spurt occurred in the next month and a half; by the end of it I was only a few inches taller than Terry, and didn’t recognize my, now childish, face in the mirror. I had an embarrassing conversation with my doctor about the lack of change in my genitals other than hair loss, which ended with my gaining of the knowledge that that would take place in the last phase of the procedure.
I invested in a stepping stool to allow me to reach the top shelves in my kitchen, bought new clothes that actually fit, and traded in my pickup for a white and maroon child-sized car. I had lost the rest of my adult teeth by then as well, and had most of the baby teeth back already. Three months in and my voice was already back up to the pitch that it had been as a child. At first this was both embarrassing and funny in the same sense as the sound of one’s voice after inhaling helium. The doctor scheduled a visit that he claimed was more important than the routine checkups.
“So what’s this about?” I asked as I was led into the same room as before.
“We have to stop the process,”
“What?” I asked, suddenly very concerned. Flashes of thought involving my body distorted into a caricature of it’s former self whizzed through my mind at the prospect that there was something wrong.
“Oh not like that,” He said, realizing what I was thinking. “The stopping of the procedure takes a few months to slow down and then stop itself completely. So we do this now to stop it at the right time.”
“Oh,” I said, relieved. He led me into the room and I went to the machine and stepped inside without further prompting. I had done my research this time and found what the shot and light were for specifically. The shot was a one-time-only thing that was permanently in the system after first being introduced. The blue lights in the machine emit a certain kind of radiation that initiates the process. There are also green lights that emit a different kind that stops the process. The level of exposure determines the speed at which the reaction takes place. It is possible to have the transformation from adult to child take place in the matter of just a few days, though it is described as one of the most painful experiences a human being can go through, to have it done that fast.
He shut the door and the green lights came on immediately. The same sweltering heat as before built up, only this time about twice as fast. I was unable to breathe by the time the lights turned off and the door was opened. I stumbled out, leaned over with my hands on my knees and tried to stop myself from puking. This time there was no light-headedness, only nausea.
“Here,” The doctor said as he put a bucket on the floor in between my feet. I vomited a large quantity of half digested food and the nausea stopped immediately. “I forgot to tell you not to eat anything the day before we did this.” He said apologetically and shrugged.
I felt like hitting him, but along with my diminished stature came significantly decreased strength and I doubted that it would even hurt.
“We need to do some blood work to make sure that it was effective and that the youthing process is slowing down.” He said as he got the apparatus to extract a small quantity of my blood. This consisted of a needle attached to a rubber tube attached to a vial. I let him do what he had to do and left quickly as soon as I was dismissed. The blood work came back the next day and everything was going exactly as expected.
Two weeks after that I stopped getting shorter at an inch and a half below Terry. Shortly thereafter the “last phase” that the doctor and me had an embarrassing conversation with began. It was, admittedly, disappointing. It was also very slow, taking the rest of two months, at which point I guess I was officially a child again, which was an odd idea to cope with.
I spent a lot of time sitting in front of my bathroom mirror, trying to get used to having the face that I had been used to seeing as a child. A greater portion of my time was spent dealing with the daily challenges of being so short again. I will admit, without shame, that I considered purchasing stilts.
Terry took a perverse amount of pleasure in, once again, being taller than me. All of the height jokes that I had made over the time since he had most recently undergone the procedure were redirected back at me. We hung out with each other a lot more often, as well. Thought we were both used to people with adult bodies and people with child bodies interacting seamlessly, there seemed to be less of a previously unnoticed tension between us now that we looked roughly the same age. Other than that no one treated me any differently than before, with the exception of my mom, would seemed absolutely smitten at the thought that her little boy was, in fact, a little boy. She wouldn’t stop calling and asking when I was coming over let her see me. A deviation from the usual complaint that I never went to see her, but no less unpleasant.
I will admit that I stopped regretting the procedure; I might actually venture so far as to say that the first few weeks were the time of my life.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 9:39 pm
Chap. Two.
Maybe the restructuring of my brain had made it harder to be negative, but things seemed to be looking up for the first few weeks. I quickly adapted to being shorter, even to the point that I viewed it as having more physical freedom than before because I could get things that dropped behind furniture usually without having to move said furniture.
The child-sized car also seemed to go a lot faster than my pickup ever did. The speedometer begged to differ but to me it felt like it had a lot more under its minuscule hood to work with. I had to be careful on the way to work not to absently press the gas pedal too hard. Speaking of work, I didn’t seem to mind the monotony of that either. I still found it boring and tedious, but it seemed more bearable somehow.
On the weekend of my second week of having officially re entered childhood, physical childhood at least, I gave in to my mom’s requests and drove down to see her. She had invited her friends over for the occasion but failed to mention that little detail to me.
“Oh, lookit him!” Her friend, Margaret, said as she leaned forward and touched my cheeks. Margaret had undergone youthing most recently twelve years ago, which made her physical appearance close to that of a seventeen year old. She was in fact roughly thirty years older than my mom.
“Let go of him. He only looks like a kid,” Janet said and pulled Margaret back by the shoulder. Margaret in turn pulled painfully on my face for about half a second before letting go. I had always liked Janet, or Jan as she requested she be referred to, because she seemed eternally youthful in mind, which was more than could be said for Margaret or my mom. She also usually seemed a lot more level headed than the others. She currently looked around the age of thirteen, despite the fact that she was celebrating a century on earth one week from then, on Sunday.
“You look just like you did back then,” My mom said as she drew in closer. I had expected this reaction but it still felt a little like being on display in some museum or zoo. It was a very uncomfortable situation. “I’ve got to get a picture” She said and disappeared back into the dimly lit house. There was an awkward silence between the three of us still standing out there, while Margaret eyed me almost like a hungry person would eye a stake and Janet looked at me with an unreadable expression. Margaret’s hands twitched forward slightly a few times, almost as if she was barley resisting the urge to grab my face again.
“I’ve got it!” My mom called out from just behind the doorway as she came out holding the camera. She took the first photo without any warning, whatsoever. “Now go stand over there,” She said and pointed to the front lawn. I complied. The view from the lawn was simultaneously eerie and nostalgic. It was eerie because looking up at the house from there, the sky seemed to fill more of a person’s view than you’d at first expect. It was nostalgic because it was where my childhood friends and me had played countless games of everything from tag to pretending that we were our favorite movie heroes. At least until we went our separate ways, that is.
My mom raised the camera and I forced a smile that felt more like a grimace. It was apparently passable, though, because she snapped the picture and directed me to a new spot to have another picture taken. All in all twelve of them were, five in various spots around the house, six were at a park that I used to play at as a kid, and one at the restaurant where my mom insisted on treating us all to dinner, before the old camera’s old roll of film ran out. That old roll of film very likely contained pictures of me the first time that I been a child as well.
The dinner went as uneventfully as ever, we talked mainly about my varied, mischievous exploits from when I was growing up, and about when and if I was going to get a better job than the one I was currently holding. I wasn’t able to convince my mom to let me help pay for the meal, but I did cover the tip. Overall; a standard evening.
The drive home on the older of the two highways connecting the town that I grew up in and the town that I lived in; also standard. I got home, climbed into my, now drastically oversized, bed, turned out the bedside lamp and went to sleep.
The next morning I woke up, glad that it was my day off. I went into the bathroom, urinated, went into the kitchen, drank some water, went back into my bedroom and promptly fell asleep again. I slept until noon, at which point I got out of bed, went into the bathroom, and urinated the water that I drank before going back to sleep. I wasn’t tired any more, so I sat down in front of the TV, and turned it on to the news. This was how I typically spent my days off, either sleeping, running errands, or watching TV. This time there were no errands to run.
I grabbed some chips and dip as I listened to the news broadcast. It was about a slew of seemingly related carjackings in some far off city on the Atlantic coast. I changed the channel to 620, where a made-for-TV movie that I had wanted to see was coming on later in the day. Right now there was a show on about a crocodile that had been injured somehow. They were stitching up a wound underneath its right forelimb at the moment that I turned it on. I watched that for a few minutes to find out what had happened; it turns out that it had gotten stuck in someone’s fence and torn itself up trying to escape. I change the channel to 430, where a movie was on about a demonic carnie terrorizing a group of children. I watched that until it was over, at which point I checked the TV guide listings for when the movie I was waiting for came on. They showed that it did at eight; it was now two thirty eight.
I thought briefly on how to eat up five and a half hours, as I put away the chips and dip, which I had abandoned on the table next to the couch about halfway through the film. I decided to take a walk, so I went into the bathroom, quickly combed my hair, just enough so that it didn’t look like I had just been through a wind tunnel any more, put my shoes on, and headed out the door.
As I walked decided to go by the library, since I hadn’t had a book to read since I returned the last one. I passed another car accident, this one much more serious than the one I had seen the other day. A child-sized car was stuck completely underneath the hood of an adult-sized pickup; it looked a lot like my old one, as a matter of fact. There was a tow truck on the scene, lifting the front end of pickup into the air, engine parts fell off and clattered to the ground as it did so. Four men, physically adult men as opposed to physically childish men, were pulling down on the child-sized car, apparently trying to dislodge it. There was nothing that I could do to help, so I just continued on my way.
The librarian looked to be about ten, though I couldn’t have guessed her actual age. I didn’t know her well enough to ask. The assistant librarian, on the other hand, had refused to get youthed, calling it an abomination. She was just getting a few gray hairs on her head.
“Oh, Mr. Warner,” She said, surprised as she looked from my library card down to me. “I see you had that procedure done after all.” She said, smiling even though spite clearly showed through her voice.
“Yeah,” I said as I passed the book that I had picked out after about two minutes of browsing over the desk. I was trying to sound nonchalant.
“Well that’s nice,” She said as she scanned first the barcode on my card, then the barcode on my book. “It says here that you have an overdue fine,” She said, briefly looking at the computer screen. It was turned towards her, so I couldn’t see what was on it, though I knew for a fact that I had returned the last book on time.
“How much is it?” I asked, hoping that this wouldn’t turn into some sort of scene.
“Thirty cents for turning it in late,” She paused as if considering. “and another forty for damages to the book.” The smile on her face never faltered.
I pulled out my wallet, found three quarters in it and reached across the desk to hand them to her. She grabbed my hand and pulled hard. My chest slammed painfully into the lip on the edge of the desk as she bent down so that our faces were almost touching.
“I hope you’ll enjoy that youthful body while it’s burning in hell!” She let spittle fly into my face as she talked. She let go and I stumbled backwards, dropping the money onto the counter. She practically threw the book that I had checked out at me. I walked quickly away, feeling her gaze burn into the back of my head the whole way until I got out the door.
“Crazy b***h,” I muttered to myself and started the walk home.
I passed by the scene of the crash; there wasn’t anything there now. The only indication that anything had happened was a single curving streak of asphalt that was lighter than that that surrounded it. This was likely where the child’s car had scraped the street as it was pushed underneath the pickup.
I made it home and realized that I had left the TV on. There was now a show on about current research into possibilities for solving the problem of interplanetary travel. I changed the channel to the one that the movie I wanted to see would come on later, and put the TV on mute. I reclined across the couch after turning on the lights in the room and kicking off my shoes. I then began to read.
The book was a little hard to follow, it started in the middle of the sequence and then alternated between moving from the beginning to towards the middle, and from the middle towards the end, but I was able to get into it anyway. Reading through the first three chapters easily ate up the time remaining until the movie came on.
I unmuted the TV about eight minutes before the movie started, got up, and went into the kitchen to make some popcorn. I grabbed the stepping stool out of the little mini-closet in the kitchen and set it up underneath the shelf that had the popcorn bags in it. It turned out that there was only one bag left, though, and I reminded myself to buy more.
I sat on the couch and waited as the microwave did its thing. The smell and sound of popcorn being made quickly filled the room as the last commercials before the movie started came one.
Are you depressed?
“Might be,” I said, mockingly. I had seen this commercial at least twenty times before.
Feeling run down, anxious, or just-
“Human?” I interrupted the last symptom that it listed.
Depression is one of the most widespread mental disorders in the world. Studies have shown that one in every three people is depressed. Look at the people beside you; do they look unhappy? Then it’s you. You need to buy this product, if not for you then for the people around you. Call Mantra Industries today, and start living a better life, for tomorrow.
The commercial ended with an orange-red smiley face cresting a hill like the sun while the words “Mantra Industries” appeared above it, made to look like a rainbow. Their number appeared below the logo.
The microwave beeped and I went to get my popcorn. With the aid of the stepping stool, I got the popcorn bowl down from the shelf it was in and put it next to the microwave. After filling the bowl, I was back on the couch idly eating while I waited for the movie to come on.
Two more commercials, one about macaroni and cheese, as if that needed advertising, and the other about a brand of shoes came on before the beginning credits of the movie began to show up on the screen. About a quarter of the way through the movie, I discovered that a five year old can’t handle an entire bag of popcorn as easily as his twenty-five year old counterpart, and ended up dumping the rest of the bowl into the trashcan.
The movie was disappointing; it had been advertised as being completely about something that actually took place within the scope of about two minutes out of the entire two hours. I didn’t mind though, its not like I had had anything better to do.
I washed the popcorn bowl after the movie was over, and then went to bed; I had work the next day.
I woke up the next morning and got read for work. The morning was unusually foggy, so I ended up getting there a few minutes later than usual. That didn’t really matter though; it just meant I was on time instead of a few minutes early. Work that day went just like any other day.
The fog had cleared completely by the time I got off and made the trip to the hospital. I was going to the hospital to pick up my clothespin, which is a pin that people who have been youthed have to wear somewhere, clearly visible, on an article of clothing to differentiate them from normal children. There was a time limit of three months after the youthing process had been completed in which a person had to purchase a pin, which was pretty much just a zigzag of thick, dull silver wire that ended in a ball on one end, and looped tightly back on itself at the other in order to be pinned to clothing, and get themselves registered as having undergone the process. There was a fee for both; ten dollars for the pin, and thirty-five to get registered.
I filled out all the information on the registration sheet with help from records kept by my forgetful doctor. The records were for the date the procedure began and ended. Then, I paid the registration fee and for the pin and was on my way about fifteen minutes after I got there.
At first I clipped the pin to the collar of my shirt but it began to irritate me after about thirty seconds, so I put it in the dashboard cup holder until I could think of a place to put it where I would be unlikely to notice its presence. When I arrived at my house, I clipped it to my shirt again just for the short walk from my car to my front door, because as my mother used to tell me “They’ll peg you for anything.”
The pin came to a rest on the table next to my couch and I came to a rest on the couch itself, grabbing the book I had been reading from the same table. I read for the remainder of the evening before going to bed.
I forgot to wear the pin on several occasions over the next two months, which was partially what the three month time limit was for, a consequence free time in which to make it common practice to wear it. By the time the time limit expired, though, it was like second nature to attach it to the left sleeve, which is where I found it annoyed me the least, of whatever shirt I had decided to wear.
It seems ironic that on the first day after the three-month period ended, I forgot to wear the badge while going to the library. I had finished the previous book about a month before then and returned it in the outside drop box, not wanting to deal with the assistant librarian. I had neglected to check out a new book since then for the same reason. Until that day, that is. I had grown incredibly bored and eventually convinced myself that I shouldn’t fear her just because I lacked the physical strength to do much in the way of fighting back. She had referenced hell, so she was probably a Christian, which meant that I probably didn’t have much to worry about no matter how crazy she was.
Two police officers were leaning against their parked police cruiser and talking to one another as they observed the activities of the children, actual children, who were playing in the park that their car was parked by. The city’s police force was composed of individuals that had decided to dedicate their lives to their jobs in a literal sense. They didn’t undergo youthing so that they would have the physical capability to do their job. The larger of the two policemen saw me looking at him, smiled, and waved. I returned the smile and waved back just as I went into the library.
I didn’t see the assistant librarian anywhere, so she was probably putting books back on the shelves. I figured that if I found something fast enough, I could avoid an encounter with her altogether. I grabbed a book pretty much randomly from the section that I usually picked them out from and quickly walked to the front desk. The assistant librarian was standing there frowning at me.
I didn’t say anything, but put the book and my library card on the table and took a few steps backward. She, equally silently, scanned the barcodes on both and pushed them back across the desk. I grabbed them quickly and started to walk out.
“Hey,” She said, sounding angry. I braced myself for another telling off but didn’t get what I was expecting. “You forgot your change last time,” She said with only a hint of the spite and malice. She put a nickel on the desk but didn’t bother to slide it across.
“That’s fine. Uh, keep it,” I said and started to turn around to leave.
“No, I insist,” She said in a way that let me know that she knew I was scared of her.
I was about to refuse again, but decided to just take the nickel and get out. I walked over to the desk and tried to get it. It was about an inch out of reach, so I had to stand on tiptoes and, once more, press my chest painfully into the lip of the desk to get it. Just as my fingers touched it, books slammed down right beside my head, startling me badly. I let out a cry without realizing it and jumped backwards, falling over.
“What is your problem?!” I shouted at the assistant librarian, whose hands were still on the books.
“Sh! This is a library.” She said quietly but angrily. I got up, grabbed the book I had checked out, and left the building.
Almost as if on cue, as soon as I set foot on the cement just outside the library door, there was a loud crash. At first I didn’t know where it had come from and just ducked down as quickly as I could. The crazy notion entered my head that the assistant librarian was shooting at me entered my mind before I noticed movement to my far left. The police officers were running towards something that was blocked from my view by the building. I ran around the corner and saw that a head on collision had occurred between a car and a pickup. I continued to run towards the scene of the accident, thinking that I could help out and almost sure that there was someone screaming in one of the vehicles. I had a brief moment to wonder if every pickup driver in the city was blind before I had the wind knocked out of me by the same cop who had waved at me before. He had, seemingly effortlessly, stopped me and before I knew what was happening had lifted me completely off the ground. I was about to protest this when my feet hit the ground again in a none-to-gentle manner. The police officer had turned me away from the accident and towards the park where all the previously playing children were now staring at the accident.
“Nothing to see here, kid, go play with your friends.” He said just before he gave me what to him must have been the smallest of shoves in the direction of the park. I was about to say that I was an adult and point out the pin, but noticed only then that I had forgotten to put it on before leaving. I was then faced with a moral dilemma, help out in whatever way I could with the accident victims and take the fine for being in public without the badge, or go over to the park and leave before anyone could notice from my behavior that I wasn’t really a child and avoid the fine.
The cop’s quick footsteps sounded as he ran back towards the accident and I turned around after him, looking back at the accident site. Right around twelve adult-sized figures and five or six child-sized ones were already mulling around the two vehicles, and it looked like they had it under control. I grabbed the book that I had dropped when the cop had picked my up and walked towards the park, intending to hang a sharp right at the last second and go back towards my house. I looked back to make sure that the cop wasn’t watching me, to my surprise he was. He kept glancing from what he was doing over to me, and why not? He did think I was a little kid after all. I looked back towards the park and continued walking through it instead of going back towards my house. I was looking for a place where I could inconspicuously hide for a few moments, in the hopes that he would stop looking over here when he lost sight of me. The trees were two thin even for a child to hide behind and the only playground equipment usable for my intentions was a jungle gym that already had five or six children playing on it where I could easily blend in, and a large, abandoned, piece of equipment that was essentially a glorified slide, with many apparently useless pieces of plastic and rubber coated metal sticking out of it. I made a B-line for the latter, all the while thinking that this was just a little too much to go through just to avoid an eighty-dollar fine.
I arrived, grabbed the edge of the plastic and half slid, half swung underneath it. My feet collided with something and I heard a child cry out as if they had been startled.
“Hey, find your own hiding spot,” He said and pushed me back out none to gently. I walked away, wondering why someone else would be hiding, until I saw a girl of around eight looking under a table for something. It occurred to me that they must be playing hide and seek and I was momentarily lost to nostalgia. Memories of when my late brother and me used to play it around the house we grew up in and the local parks. I was brought out of these memories when a child a lot taller than me nearly knocking me over when he hit me with his arm as he ran by. I saw the person chasing him, a girl who was likely to be his sister, and felt an entirely unwelcome and uncharacteristic urge to join the children at play. I looked back towards the police officer and saw that he was once more leaning against his car and observing the playground.
“This is dumb.” I said to myself and started walking across the park in the direction of my house. I got to the curb and across the street when I heard a car driving up the street from behind me and paid it no attention. That is, until it pulled far enough forward for me to see that it was a police cruiser. It pulled up to the curb about fifteen feet in front of me and stopped. I stopped with it.
“What’s up?” The cop said after getting out, walking around the car and kneeling down in front of me. The way he said it sounded as if he were suspicious and adrenaline poured into my system, I thought I had been caught. I started stammering trying to come up with an explanation to get me out of the fine.
“I-ah I don’t-“ I began, he interrupted me.
“You look a little young to be walking around town on your own.” He said and I could see his eyes moving rapidly beneath his light shades. He was looking for the pin that I wasn’t wearing.
Just tell the truth, he might not fine you. He’ll understand. An internal voice whispered. Despite this, however, I found myself lying.
“My…”
Mom or Mommy, what would a five year old say? Think damn it!
“…Mommy lets me go by myself.” I said, trying to sound convincing. It was only eighty dollars, but it was eighty dollars that I didn’t have.
The officer paused, apparently trying to decide if I was actually a child or one of the creeps all over television who just pretend to be. It occurred to me then that I practically was one of those creeps.
No, I’m doing this to avoid a fine, not feel up a kid.
The cop removed his shades, folded them and stuck them into his pocket. I realized then that he was utterly uncomfortable with the situation at hand. I could understand why.
“Right, wall stay out of trouble, ok?” He said as he stood up and walked away. I nodded and he walked back around the car. He awarded me one last appraising look before getting back into the car and driving off. I let out a sigh of relief and continued on my way.
I thought to myself about the lie that I had just told, which dredged up memories of other lies that I had gotten away with in the past.
“Dan did it,” I had told me mom and gotten my brother grounded on many occasions.
“My friend got a new one and gave me his old one,” My excuse to my mom for owning a stolen mp3 player.
“If you eat this special Indian sand you’ll get magic powers,” Tricking my brother into eating a handful of dirt when we were little.
“I’ll turn it in tomorrow” Used countless times to get teachers off my back about a homework assignment.
“You little s**t! Do you know what you’ve put your father and me through?” A woman with dirty blonde hair to her distraught looking son. This one wasn’t a memory; it was happening in a house that I was passing. I could see it through the window. The boy said something that I didn’t hear and she began to unleash a series of painful looking blows with one hand while she held a tiny baby in the other. From the comparative ages of her and the boy I guessed that she had given birth to him just as soon as physically capable since her last youthing, assuming she had been youthed.
I continued on my way, it wasn’t my place to help, nor did I have the capability. About eight minutes later I was back at my house and reading the book that I had checked out.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
