It is said by wise and sentimental poets that a child’s eyes see farther than an adult’s, and who would — with even less than a moment’s thought — claim otherwise? Beyond the ridge awaits a vista crowded with possibilities, each one deemed more improbable than the last by teeth-grinding codgers eager to assert a litany of personal failures should anyone care to hear, but no one does and if that isn’t proof the world’s gone to ruin then what is? But
The boy hurried on, tracked by the dull eyes of the lepers in front of their hovels, squatting forlorn and forgotten each in a nest of flies when flies with singular poignancy expound the proof of cold-legged indifference. And the scrawny half-wild dogs crept out to follow him for a time, gauging with animal hunger if this one might be weakened, a thing to be taken down. But the boy collected rocks and when a dog drew too close he let fly. Ducked tails and startled yelps and now the dogs vanished like ghosts beneath stilted shacks and down narrow, twisting lanes off the main road.
Overhead, the sun regarded all with its unblinking omnipotence, and went on stealing moisture from every surface to feed its unquenchable thirst. And there were long-legged birds prancing on the sewage flats just past Brownrun Bay, beaks darting down to snatch up fleas and whatnot, while lizard-ducks nested on float shy;ing shit islands further out, calling to one another their hissing announcement of each bell in perfect cadence with the city’s water clocks and those sonorous chimes drifting out over the lake, although why lizard-ducks were obsessed with such artificial segmentation of time was a question as yet unanswered even after centuries of scholarly pursuit — not that the foul-smelling creatures gave a whit for the careers they had spawned, more concerned as they were with enticing up from the soupy water eels that would swallow their eggs, only to find the shells impervious to all forms of digestion, whilst the scaled monstrosities within pre shy;pared to peck their way free and then feed on eel insides unto gluttony.
What significance, then, such details of the natural world, when the boy sim shy;ply walked on, his long hair bleached by the sun and stirred like a mane by the freshening breeze? Why, none other than the value of indifference, beneath which a child may pass unnoticed, may pass by free as a fluffed seed on the warm cur shy;rents of summer air. With only a faint memory of his dream the night before (and yes, the one before that, too, and so on) of that face so vicious and the eyes so caustic as to burn him with their dark intentions, the face that might pursue him through each day with the very opposite of indifference, and see how deadly that forgetfulness might be for the child who hurried on, now on a dirt track winding its way up into the modest hills where baleful goats gathered beneath the occa shy;sional tree.
For the blessing of indifference might be spun on end, momentarily offering the grim option of curse, because one child’s gift can well be another’s hurt. Spare then a moment for the frightened beast named Snell, and all the cruel urges driv shy;ing him to lash out, to torment the brother he never wanted. He too thrives on in shy;difference, this squat, round-shouldered, swaggering tyrant before whom the wild dogs in the shanty town cowered in instinctive recognition that he was one of their own, and the meanest of the lot besides; while the boy, chest swelled with, power, continued on, trailing his intended victim with something in his soul that went far beyond a simple beating this time, oh, yes. The thing inside, it spread black, hairy legs like a Spider, his hands transformed there at the end of his wrists, oh, spiders, yes, hook-taloned and fanged and onyx-eyed, and they could close into bony fists if they so desired, or they could stab with venom — why not both?
He carried rocks as well. To wing at the lepers he passed, to laugh as they flinched or cried out in pain, and he rode their ineffectual curses all the way up the road.
