From: boserj@netcom.com (Jeffrey Boser)
Subject: The Little Boy
Date: Sun, 06 Sep 92 21:31:41 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 

A short time after my father died, I sat in a fold up metal chair,
staring at a brassy wooden thing.  In it, a piece of flesh that held
nothing of what used to be my dad lay.
 
All around me were people who met him, at work or at play.  All of
them sat staring at a 13 year old kid, whose dry eyes didnt seem
to see his father.  They were very, very intensely aware of how
little they knew of him, and how he felt.  And yet, programmed
somehow, they tried to be 'supportive' and 'helpful'  and said
nice things like 'Im sorry' or 'he was a good man'.
 
The boy hated them.  Not that little boy hate, but that cold,
steely rage.  He peeled back their skin and flesh in his mind,
tortured them as they so ingnorantly tortured him.

On that day, he lost his innocence.  He lost his carefree manner,
he lost his ability to sing, to remember, to love.  He had his
hate though.  So he folded it up carefully, making the edges
match and the corners perfect, and put it in his pocket.  He forgot
about Snow, his puppy, he forgot about his magical light saber,
he forgot everything.  He forgot how to cry.  For a long time,
his eyes would be dry.  always dry.

That night he curled up on bed.  His thin sheet was wrapped all
around him, like a mummy.  tight against his neck, it protected
him from things in the dark that he now knew existed.  Not some
childhood boogieman, but there were things out there now.  things
that could hurt you, make you bleed when you didnt want to.

From that day on, he would need a reason for everything.  For living,
for not living, for everything.  And for the moment, the little boy's
hate was enough of a reason.

So he went back to life.  He went to school.  He came home.  He
slept, he ate, he went to school, he came home, he slept, he went
to school, he came home, he slept, he went to school, he came home,
he slept.  And he never ever, not once, made a friend.  He would
walk through the halls and lives of people, and people would shuffle
nervously away from him.  He was invisible, nervous glances jerked
from him to the floor or ceiling.

Nobody wanted to be his friend.  At least, not once they touched
his heart and mind and found how sharp they were.  Somehow around
him there was a vacuum of people.  The kids that teased him for so
long avoided him.  Maybe they saw the hate in him.  But whatever the
reason, everybody was afraid of him.  Even the adults.  The boy was
blessed with the genes of his two dead parents, and his mind was a
powerful thing.  He was smarter than the teachers, than his step-mom,
than everybody in his life.  And they all knew it, without him
saying so.

When he walked into a room, it dropped in temperature.  He radiated
something.   Something on edge of perception, that suddenly made
everybody very uncomfortable.  As if somehow something threatening
was in the room.  And he was threatening, for some reason he managed
to touch the tenders spots in everybody with a knife.  Like what he did
to his step-mom, leaving her weeping on her bed as his footsteps
on the tile floor left the house.  It wasnt mocking, it wasnt arrogant,
it wasnt haughty.  If anything, he was humble and polite, the boy
was.  But somehow he said exactly the wrong thing.  or didnt say the
right thing.  Somehow he didnt seem alive, he was cold, like the corpse
in the brass and woodie thing, like the metal fold up chair he had
sat upon.

He thought it was a game.  He watched them move under his hands.  Watched
the adults and other kids dance to his words and thoughts.  He got a
cold satisfaction from this.  His hate liked it.

But then something happened.  And nobody is sure on this, not even the
boy.  Maybe hate was no longer a good enough reason.  Maybe he learned
how to make himself dance.  Maybe he made others dance so well that he
danced with them.  maybe a little or alot of all of this.

The boy didnt seem like a threat anymore.  In fact, it seemed he was
trying to desparately keep from drowning.  Trying hard to keep the
monster he had made in its brass and woody cage, buried deep in the
earth to rot and moulder with his father.  flesh and blood, clotted
and falling apart.  as he watched dry-eyed from his fold up metal
chair.

Somehow he grew too big for that brassy wooden box.  And he found
he did care.  He played games with people so long, perhaps it was
inevitable that he find one that he felt an affinity with.  One or
two that he didnt want to make dance.  He got two things back at
that point.  He remembered how to cry.  And he remembered how to
love.

But again, it wasnt a child's tears.  It was an adults cry, open
eyed and full of pain and the need to strike out at it.  It wasnt
a child's love.  It was an empty, hollow thing.  Made tender and
joyous by the hate that it balanced.  The ache that constantly
followed him, the need to be loved.  The two joined, the love and
the cry, and he learned to weep.  He still does.

But he still felt the pain.  The ability to cry, or to love, didnt
get rid of it.  It just kept him from being hard.  And the powerful
weapon of his mind was still there.

So he locked himself in the brassy wooden box with his rotting father
again.  Curled up against a cold corpse that would never again touch
him with warmth, and prepared to wait.  And while he waited, he made
what the world had taken away from him.

He made his father again.

The dry-eyed weeping little boy made a wise dad.  One that never had
any substance, but had wisdom.  That saw him and loved him.  His father
lived again, inside the boy.  Deep, so utterly deep.  And real, in
a way that nobody could possibly understand.  Psychology records
multiple personalities, but this wasnt it.  Joseph was a part of
who he was now, not something distinct.  The two ideas, jeff and joe,
dreamed each other up, and twined.  Somehow it was magical.  The
magic that was still within him, the magic that grew too big for the box.

Nobody ever understood this.  Nobody saw.  The shifts in perspective,
in wisdom and insight, came as flows and peeks and hints.  There was
nothing sudden, and no personality change.  The boy was too good for
that to show.  He restructured his own personality regularly.  The boy
was now friendly, seemingly open..  and it was still a game for the
most part.

The boy that sat on the fold up metal chair now laid his head on his
father's hairy chest in the coffin, and let the world pass by.  The
peeks out of the brassy wooden box came infrequently.  But he rested
in the ice cold arms of his dead father.  And the hot burning world
flew by outside.

He comes out now and then, when the loneliness becomes unbearable.
When the rage needs satisfaction, when the hatred he feels for himself
needs expression.  He does hate himself, the boy does.  More than
anything else on the world.  Why else would he lock himself in the
brassy wooden coffin with his dead father?  Why would only the
father he became for himself be the only one to want to love him?
Why does noone knock on the coffin's top, and want him to come play
with him?  Why does noone want to touch him.  He is ugly, he is a
monster.  Why else would his father die to leave him?

The questions come again and again, haunting his little room.  And
he has no answer.  None that makes any sense.  He can only wait
for that knock.  Wait with the pain, the monster he is in the box.
Wait until someone comes by who will touch him.  Because they want
to touch him.  And want him to touch them.  To come out and play
in the arms of someone warm and tender, like the cold dead father
couldnt ever be.  To dance in the sun, out of the dark box.

He is still there.  waiting.
	
	On the grassy hill top, sat an old man.
	All around him, described in wondrous colors,
	the world flew.
	
	Tossed on the winds of hope and despair,
	Swirled by the forces of pain and joy,
	the storm rages.
	
	In a dusty corner lay a rumpled blanket,
	Under it lay a thing forgotten, passed by,
	the rainbow sparkled.

	From past to present, the time seemed to creep,
	and sometimes fly on wings of speed,
	the world left.


.....jeff