WIP :: Ten :: McCartney Dixon

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I am just a poor boy
Though my story's seldom told[/i]
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles

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His bruised and scabbed fingers tremble, jumping as he wakes up on a dusty plateau. The ground tremors with the force of the stallion, which itself is as powerful as a whole herd, avalanching in his direction. The blisters on his palms hammer against the warm rock while he pushes himself up. His clothing is stained, smelling strongly of hay and earth and a damp sorrow that can only be the stale sweat of pain and panic. Sandalled feet are in as bad a condition as his arms and digits, cut by years of constantly trampling brambles and sharp grasses of the stables. Long limbs twist and stretch, a dark, waxy complexion normal for those who prefer hard work outside. Alone.

A quaff of matted maple-bark hair curls and quivers, stretching for his long eyelashes which blink lethargically across extraordinary eyes. Both looking slightly outwards, one is a green like poison, or drying fodder, one the speckled brown of mud-splattered hooves. Now, they widen with dilate pupils; two dark moons, reflecting the horse which is almost upon him. Cupids bow lips, crimson and ragged with bite marks and dryness, part slowly as he releases a tiny whine, before he is struck to the ground with the immense force of the raging beast.

"Please," he stutters, voice rough, accented and broken, "you can't–" the huge form rears, rust-coloured body undulating with muscles that could pound bodies into skin sacks of flour. As the horse curls its lips in a roar more like a wildcat than his own form, the boy raises a dusty palm in front of his face. His limbs and chest are skinny, fragile. His wrists and elbows are prominent in a way his smooth cheekbones and shallow jaw aren't. "Please!" he moans again, the sibilant plea whistling between his gappy teeth, yellowed by tobacco and a hard history with more important things than hygiene to take care of.

But the mountain of a stallion isn't interested in etiquette. His eyes blaze crimson, as if blood wells in his tear ducts and flood his whites and irises instead. The boy, lanky for his age but infinitely small next to this demon, closes his eyes and draws his neat, dark brows together. "You knew I was coming for you," his nightmare fiend booms with the strength of thunder, "you knew this day would come." The boy opens his eyes again, his vision distorted by tears, and peers at the mountainous stallion from between his fingers. As it lifts one hoof to stamp down on his skull, to crush the life out of him like a brittle sponge, the boy begins to change. His hands are no longer square and rough, but slender, with polished nails and a shrunken mark where a wedding ring used to sit. His reflection in the horse's orbs, though still changed by the curved reflection, doesn't show his terrified face, with its heterochromic eyes and small, shuddering mouth, but one similar to it. A woman's face, morphed out of his own. His mother's face. The horror of the image, how he has become someone else, hits him just as the hoof does, folding into his chest and his face over and over again, shocks of pain completely muffled by impending death, the inability to scream and squirm away closing in on him like a noose, sweat pouring from him like an unpleasant characteristic, pushing everything else away from him, panic surging through him as the world goes dark, as the horse pummels and pummels him–

He wakes, clutching at his face and chest, knowing it was a dream like all the dreams he has had before. All of them so similar – always morphing into someone else just before his death, saving himself with someone else's body. So often his mother. It seems fear has left more of a mark on the boy than an imaginary monster's feet, and he rubs his purple-ringed eyes before pushing his shaken self off the mattress and pulling on his sandals. He has to feed the horses.

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When I left my home and my family
I was no more than a boy[/i]
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of a railroad station

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As the needle noses through the thin layers of fabric, he wonders how, in such a tortured reality as his own, he still manages to find solace in the most mundane of tasks. Clumsily, the thread waltzes its way across the knee of his trousers, and the boy focuses intently on not piercing his own flesh. The pain he recognizes every night is enough for such a fragile boy. His weak personality, dappled with insecurities and indivisible from the fear he is choked on constantly, is broken as a result of his problems just not going away. But, as always when he is granted, by fate and his own choice, some time away from the other lost souls who found Julia Orchards, he pushes his lips together and breathes out sharply to expel these emotions. He knows, painfully well, that anger never solved any of his problems. And he has become increasingly good at using this as a permanent mantra, and finding other ways of escaping the burden of responsibility and distrust. Like feeding the horses.

And yet, the horses have always been the source of the problem as well as the solution. Caring for them, feeding them, devouring all his time with those majestic, and still merciless, beasts, makes him one of the most reclusive of his home's – his true home – inhabitants. He is very much aware of how different he is to all of them. He's nothing compared to them, they all have their roles in the machine; their special talents, skills or quirks. Odell's tolerance for others, and her intelligence, and how the boy admires her so, and wants to spend all his time hiding like she does. Raven, with her psyche linked to other people's – though never could she help him with his, no, he would never tell anyone his dreams or his feelings, they didn't deserve that infliction. And he does see himself as an infliction, and always has, since he was a young boy.

He remembers, when he still lived with his young sister, and his mother and father, and his father's father, the famous Ratty Dixon; pig farmer extraordinaire. But his grandfather was getting old, and without the help of young McCartney, always too distracted by the wonderful world around him, his joints were quickly in the same state as the rickety wood that kept his lethargic second family, fat and stinking, from leaving him. The boy's father wouldn't take the pigs, not with a family like his old man had never had. He urged his son to take some responsibility, for the first time in his life, and make someone grateful. Perhaps where it all started, this pressure for responsibility leading McCartney to be his peers' saviour in a very different way.

At night, he would think about the pigs and fear them. Animals had never given him the excitement that he needed as a fascinated child, who didn't yet care what others thought of his look, his mind, his history which was, indeed, not yet perfected as a nightmare, and so he was set to refuse to look after them. What did he need with responsibility? Only he mattered – other people were perfectly capable of keeping themselves safe. But then the horses came. Thundering through his dreaming consciousness, coming to trample him and then, at the last second, he watched himself morph in the terrible monster's pit-like spheres into the man he had refused to help – his weak grandfather, face and gnarled knuckles contorted with the fear of a young boy. A sickening combination.

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Asking only for a workman's wages I come looking for a job
But I get no offers, only a come-on from the whores[/i]
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there

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In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade[/i]
And he carries the reminders
Of ev'ry glove that laid him down

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