scout's day out

The boy lays there for a long time. The sun crawls up out of the cave it goes to at night and stares into the window at you. The boy does not move. His eyes are open for a long time and then they shut again. The sun crawls across the sky, inching closer to the roof. The boy still doesn't move. Perhaps he is dead.

You open your mouth wide, wider than it needs to be and you stand up from where you've been sitting on the windowsill. Hello? you ask him.

To Avriel that just sounds like three soft, discordant notes climbing upwards in unison.

He rolls over, turning away from you, and pushes his face into his knees, shoulders shaking.

Alone then, today you're alone.

Lately it feels like that's how it is more and more. That doesn't hurt you, in the end, your understanding of feelings is far richer than others and your boy is the first of the children you've picked to have made it out alive. You led him in the dark and after you delivered that first thing, the commands had stopped, so you'd stayed.

You've met others like him before, watched from your place in the roots of the great ones as they were cut down.

Your boy is the first to leave the killing grounds and the first to leave with you. As you wiggle down the staircase, you remember the roughness of his hand as he lifted you out of the sand and held you cupped close.

"Thank-you," he'd said and his voice was so soft it had sounded like one of your words.

And as you reach the bottom step, you think about the boy you've just left upstairs but you also think about the boy in the sand, rivers down the skin of his face running red and clear. You wonder if they're the same.

Part of you knows inherently that your boy in the bed is the same boy who thrust his spear into that girl, was the boy left in the sand but it is getting difficult.

You saw him, you watched the shape of that memory grow small from the hovercraft's window. Your boy is messy, he leaves pieces of himself behind like bread crumbs, there'll be none of him left soon.

And you'll be alone again.

You push on the flap of the cat door. The boy installed that for you last spring. Sometimes creatures enter through it in the night. You teach them why this is not allowed. Always teaching, always learning.

The sun is hot overhead. Your body fades into transparency to handle it, little wavering form moving down the road at a slow but steady pace. You shrink yourself smaller as you move past the home of the man with the shotgun. Wrinkles deeper than the gnarled roots of a tree, vision fading he shoots in the night and you almost lose your head once.

Once is enough.

Boots on the street, a wheel turning near your head and then water splashing on your body. Voices calling, you strain to hear their notes but there are none. The tongue is foreign and sometimes you call out a response to your own song just to end the aching.

A bell jingles above your head as you slip into the sandwich shop.

"Scout!"

The voice is bright, clear and ringing, young. The patter of patent shoes on old tile, a short one comes around the counter. It's the girl, the one in the town. "Where's Avriel? You came alone?" she asks. You chirp softly once, then loud twice. Her sounds make little sense to you but you understand the questioning tone.

He is lost in the dark again you tell the town girl. To her your words just sound like the wind running through an empty log.

"I've got your favourite right here," she tells you and hops up onto a stool to pull something wrapped in paper down off the shelf.

A blue light begins to pulse from under your skin, you raise your hands to meet her as she brings it down to you and you gain two inches of height in your excitement. Her fingers pull at kitchen string and your spectral hands dig beneath the paper to touch the rotting pig flesh.

Two feet, cloven, useless now that they're detached.

Your mouth opens wide like a scope, almost wider than your head is and as it widens, you grow. You grow but you stay the same and the space within grows too, a million root falls deep. You are older than the sun but younger than the sea and that has always, always mattered.

You take the pigs feet and you push them into your mouth whole. They're gone before the girl in the town has time to pull the string away and so the string goes down too. You feel it trail behind, touching the side of your mouth, your throat, gone.

She balls the paper up and you keep your mouth open to catch it. The blood on the wax tastes good, little ruby drops, the blue light goes red for a flickering moment.

She laughs, always laughs and then she looks over her shoulder before turning back to grin at you. "Will you take this home to Avriel?" she asks and then presents you with a package shaped like the one your boy always takes.

Avriel is the only word that you know.

Your mouth opens again and this time the girl from the town places the package in your mouth. You close it, but do not swallow the package down.

This one isn't for you.

The bell again as you leave. Jingling, feels like birds in your ears. Birds are the flapping ones and they struggle going down, wings brushing against the side of your throat as they go.

The street is made up of hundreds of stones and you jump from stone to stone, little light pulsating happily as you start your journey home. Some people recognize you. They point at you as you go, they flap their hands at you, they get too close, hands reach to touch but you shy away before they can.

A rat runs across your path, a boy lets out a loud, high-pitched note and your light flashes yellow for a brief moment. Then the rat is running down the tunnel of your throat and you feel it's tail slide along behind it but then it is gone.

Always gone.

Mouth open wide, the child stares at you and you stare back, big black empty pits gazing, fathomless, you are so small but so large all at once. The child closes their hands together in prayer before stumbling backwards into his mother's legs.

You could swallow this world whole before moving on to the next.

On your way back you are distracted by a bee. Face in a flower, soft butt hanging out with dangling legs, you follow him back to his hive. The detour takes you some time but you climb his tree until the buzzing is the only sound you know anymore and then you take his hive, buzzing whole and you push it down your throat.

Until the buzzing is gone and there are sticky, tacky trails of honey down your throat.

And when you slip under the gate to walk up the path to your home, there is your boy, sitting on the front step. A banana is cut up in rounds leading up the walkway and you stop to swallow each slice as you go.

"I thought you left me," he tells you.

Then you cough up his sandwich.