Post by Kyle Shane on Jun 19, 2017 2:56:26 GMT -5
The little boy eyed the glittering trophy through the display case. His nose was pushed up like a pig's and his exhalations caused a spreading fog, but his eyes glittered with wonderment at the prize for P.S. 138's first grade art fair. It seemed to him that he had never seen anything that shined like that in all of his life.
Karen came up behind the tousle-headed little scamp and skritched at his hair with her fingers affectionately. Her little boy looked up at his momma, even distracted, with such a sunny disposition that it made her melt as always. Her boy. She bent down to eye level with him, straightening up his little collared shirt with a dinosaur on the front, licking her thumb and wiping a stray of charcoal from his cheek, and she gave him a brave smile. "You excited for the contest, baby?"
"Yeah!" his voice boomed throughout the modest little hallway. Other parents were being led by their children, this way and that, showing them in that ceaseless child way all the neat things about their class and their school, and the parents all walked it with a bemused, and in varying degrees put upon expression; a sort of "the things we put up with, huh" kinda look. And her boy, her little Kyle, sometimes got intimidated by these. He retreated into his head so often. But as she let him take her pinky and lead her onward, down the hall, he was all his boisterous, charming self.
Karen was aware of the shark-like shadow at her back. Menacing and gliding through the packs without coming into contact. Dark, pitiless eyes flicking over everything. The cramped, rundown rows of desks in the rooms, for example, or the kids. Eric let out a "Feh" now and then to let her know she was there. Whenever she felt him get near she felt a little bit more crestfallen. It would have meant so much more to her these days if he hadn't taken so much time off from the plant - it would have been such a lovely evening for her and Kyle to come see the art fair if he hadn't driven them. He had downed two-and-a-quarter of a six pack as it was on the way there... when Karen had stood at the curb with Kyle's tutor, Miss Eichner, talking about the challenges of raising a boy with his... gifts... Eric had stayed behind the wheel, upturning his can of Pabst like he was nursing a teat and blaring some George Thorogood. And then, he had exited the car with a slam, sauntered up to Miss Eichner, belched, and asked her "if the little shit was learning how to tie his shoes yet" with a hostile pessimism.
He was just there, behind her, sneering at a finger painting some child had done on construction paper, looking at it with a contempt that made his face ugly.
Karen let herself be led by Kyle, who lugubriously ran her forward, still using the pinky as a leash. His cheeks were stretched in a grin that made her realize she hadn't ever seen him so happy...
Especially not since Eric's gotten his time off, she thought, biting her thumbnail pensively...
"I can't wait to show you what I drawed for the arts fair momma," He was babbling happily. "Its a real special drawring!"
"Kyle, baby, slow down," she said with a smile, "Come on, baby, I need that arm, now show me what you did..." Although her throat was tightening up and she risked a glance back to Eric.
Because she had tried to hide it, since he'd been coming home so early, but, her boy's childish little scribbles held an indefinable, eerie power.
Her boy put art out into the world from an imagination so vivid that it manifested itself in the real world.
Her thoughts were black as she reflected on the darkness inherent in kids. Before the ages of puberty, when they're still learning a moral center, and are creatures of impulse and response. When a boy responds to the negative energy of a father who is so crude and brutish with confusion and hurt. When a boy begins to instinctually manifest guardians to fight back. It had started innocently enough... a queer little drawing of misshapen winged things with eyes and beaks turned into a flock of black razor-winged shrieking hell-birds. And that was just a childish drawing come to life.
There was worse to come, when her inventive little boy dreamed up a tableau of a gnome who cut his daddy's ties in half as some kind of juvenile, subconscious way of hurting something that was his. An act that, when discovered, came with a violent consequence, that had sent him sulking in his room for days. And drawing.
She didn't fear her son at all. Not like she did Eric when he was in his drink, or in a tacit way, like Eric feared Kyle. But she feared a childish imagination gone wrong, married to ugliness, pettiness, and a will to hurt someone who hurt him. That, she did fear.
She blinked herself out of her reverie because her little boy was standing, proudly beaming, holding his arms out the way a magician's pretty assistant would fawn over an act. Oooh, ahhh, presenting...
"Kyle, this is," she couldn't hide the shock in her voice, or the profound surprise. It was no jagged crayon razorbirds, that was true. "You made this?"
"I spent a lot of time on it!" He said cheekily, not seeing anything wrong. Eric was lurking around on the other side, muttering he needed 'nother beer for this crap. Karen turned her eyes back to study the drawing.
He had drawn, very clearly, tentacles, coming up from the ground, exploding upwards, and wiggling around a building that had, in childish swatch letters, been labelled as the school. She held the massive charcoal and pencil undertaking in both hands, looking over the tentacles, the clear gouts of flame rising from a window, and a tentacle wrapped around a mean stick man with downward slash marks over his eyes to indicate he was frowning. In the same, hand-daubed childish writing, the person wrapped in the tentacle was labelled, daddy.
And then, in the corner, was a crudely drawn, intersected pile of squares that seemed to be a car, with two heads poking up out of the bubble, reading, "Mommy an me maek hour eskap"
Her hands were trembling as she lowered the construction paper, but Kyle was looking at her with an intensity that unnerved her. It was probing, asking if she liked it, with a child's lack of empathy or ability to read distress. "I drew us, momma," he said simply, as if that was all.
"When are they gonna judge this stupid shit and hand out trophies, Karen," broke in Eric, loud and fully lacking restraint. He shifted as some kids pushed past him, laughing. "He drew one of his cute little cartoons, all the other kids did their artistes, now let's go already."
Kyle looked proud as he turned his face up to his dad and grinned, "I'm going to win the trophy this time!"
Karen, dubiously, thinking that his effort would look a bit... depraved, if not demonic, next to other first grader's macaroni pictures and drawings of butterflies done in crayon all over the map, folded it a little so her peering husband couldn't get a look at it. She had to find a way to let him know that just expressing himself and letting out his spiteful demons was a reward... maybe it would head off his darker impulses. "Now Kyle, baby," she said, eyes hooded, "you can't get every trophy, we -"
Eric snorted, and grabbed the construction paper in a roll from Karen. He grabbed his son's shoulder in a hard, demanding grip, and turned him back down the hallway, waving a hand at the other art projects. "Don't listen to her, boy. If you're in something, you have to be in to win. Every trophy. Collect every one of those little gold fuckers that's put in front of you, don't matter what they're for or how stupid they seem. Like this. Stupid little art show. Means nothing. But you draw cute little cartoons all the time. Go on and look at that trophy." What Karen didn't know, what none of them could have known, is how deeply rooted in a child's psyche could have become. But then... for as much as it seemed to Karen that her clingy little lovebug was a mommas boy... this streak that was growing inside of him, nurtured by talks like these, was more like his daddy every day.
"Go on, look at that trophy," Eric cajoled, "You think you got what it takes? Now look at that kid's painting. Look at all the colors he used. Look at how pretty it is." Eric was taking a peverse pleasure in this now; he had raised his son's ire and in his mean drunk was now on his way to smashing him. "Or that one. That one can draw human faces, not these lil stick figures you got here." He opened the construction paper. Despite missing the obvious symbolism, he pointed out the idiosyncrasies he saw in the kid's artwork. "That don't even look like a car. You think you're gonna win with that? You have to do better, son." He roughly shoved his son's shoulder. Kyle looked back at him with sullen, burning eyes.
"Do better. Always give 110%. Don't be a little faggot that accepts a consolation prize," he mocked, his voice turning snivelly, "A green wibbon for participation. Be a man. Do better."
"ERIC -" Karen raised her voice, and her husband turned to her, holding a flat hand up. "I'm trying to teach my son." His voice suddenly became jagged broken glass in a hiss, "What did I say to you about contradicting me when I'm trying to teach him a lesson. Do YOU need a lesson, Karen?"
She dropped her eyes, but she was still worried, looking over at Kyle. Kyle's eyes were burning, steaming into the construction paper his dad held in his hand.
Miss Eichner and a bald man, wearing a sweater vest and a horn-rimmed pair of specs came walking up. Karen knew him as the principal. "Is there a problem here?"
"I'm just handing out life lessons to my son, is that okay?" Eric snarled at the bald principal. "His momma's trying to teach him it's okay to be a loser."
Miss Eichner began talking to Eric in a low voice, trying to lead him down the hall.
Kyle's face was streaked and distraught, his mouth was pulled tight in a grimace. He looked on the verge of a meltdown. Every kid in the area was turning to look.
Suddenly, the building began to rock like it was in the throes of a quake. People were thrown off their feet, and the late afternoon sun was blocked from coming in through the outside windows. A few people gained their bearings, and looked around. One lady shrieked at the top of her lungs. Big, thick, inky black pseudopods were entangling themselves, slopping up the side of the building like nightmare octopus tentacles. En masse, people broke and ran in all different directions.
Karen stumbled to her feet, and she looked at the black shapes slapping against the glass windows with a dawning awe. She had never imagined something this powerful could come from an imagination.
He was bent over, every muscle in his small body tensed, tears streaming down his face. She darted over to him, putting a protective arm around him, as if to shelter him from a storm. He was just repeating the words over and over again. "I'll never win... never... never... Be a man... do better.... I'll never be a man... I'll never do better... Never!"
"Kyle!" she shouted over the rising din, "Kyle, sweetheart... listen to me! Listen to my voice!"
Down the hall, a father lifts up a crumbled scrap of construction paper, unrolls it, and then looks at it, really noticing the tentacles on it, and the figure with the mad downslashed eyes being crushed by them, for the first time. His jaw drops open.
"He's right!"... the boy wails, "Look at his paper, it's brighter than mine was!... An, an his, he uses his paper better, it looks better than what I did... I'll never be like them!... Never!..."
She uses her fingers to turn him to look at her, "You don't have to be!"
He can barely hear her over the roar of the din, "What do you mean?!"
"Those kids aren't you, baby!" She says, "They don't have your gift. They don't see things the way you do when they make their art, and that's okay. And they may not like what you do - HE," pointing a furious finger at the man depicted being strangled by a nightmare, "May not like what you do, but that doesn't mean that they're right."
The rumbling, the wind, and the cacophony all start dying down, as he looks over at her, still tearful, still unsure. People are pointing and gathering at the windows, looking at the swaying stalks.
"Just because someone criticizes your art, doesn't mean to stop making it. You make it for you. You find a way to make what you want to do on your terms," and then, grabbing him by his shoulders to reinforce this next part, "In a way that can be controlled, that you can control the imagery you put out in the world. Nobody in the world can do what you do, and that's your power, baby."
He looks over at her, his mouth turned down, very sad. "I just wanted to win us the trophy, momma, have something pretty and shiny for us..." And, in accordance to what his dad's way of thinking, whether he could articulate that or not just yet.
She hugged him so ferociously that there were tears in her eyes too. "Aw love. You're a special kid, you know that."
They were still hugging a few minutes later when the principal bustled through the hallways, herding some of the parents and teachers back towards the conference hall, "Harumph, well, yes, now that the - mass hysteria - has abated, we can all adjourn and - maybe present the winners of the art fair - Yes, I think that's best."
Karen held her hand out for the little tyke, both of them rising up. "Remember, Kyle. Just as long as you gave everything you can and knew in your heart you did what other people weren't going to do, that's all that matters."
"Right, momma," he says, returning to the brighter, sunnier kid from earlier, but his eyes look back and fix on a glass case inset in the wall. A golden trinket calls to him from within, and the boy's mouth quirks upward in a smirk. Because he knows that art for art's sake has it's merits... but it's so much more fun when you unlock the trophy, isn't it...?
Karen came up behind the tousle-headed little scamp and skritched at his hair with her fingers affectionately. Her little boy looked up at his momma, even distracted, with such a sunny disposition that it made her melt as always. Her boy. She bent down to eye level with him, straightening up his little collared shirt with a dinosaur on the front, licking her thumb and wiping a stray of charcoal from his cheek, and she gave him a brave smile. "You excited for the contest, baby?"
"Yeah!" his voice boomed throughout the modest little hallway. Other parents were being led by their children, this way and that, showing them in that ceaseless child way all the neat things about their class and their school, and the parents all walked it with a bemused, and in varying degrees put upon expression; a sort of "the things we put up with, huh" kinda look. And her boy, her little Kyle, sometimes got intimidated by these. He retreated into his head so often. But as she let him take her pinky and lead her onward, down the hall, he was all his boisterous, charming self.
Karen was aware of the shark-like shadow at her back. Menacing and gliding through the packs without coming into contact. Dark, pitiless eyes flicking over everything. The cramped, rundown rows of desks in the rooms, for example, or the kids. Eric let out a "Feh" now and then to let her know she was there. Whenever she felt him get near she felt a little bit more crestfallen. It would have meant so much more to her these days if he hadn't taken so much time off from the plant - it would have been such a lovely evening for her and Kyle to come see the art fair if he hadn't driven them. He had downed two-and-a-quarter of a six pack as it was on the way there... when Karen had stood at the curb with Kyle's tutor, Miss Eichner, talking about the challenges of raising a boy with his... gifts... Eric had stayed behind the wheel, upturning his can of Pabst like he was nursing a teat and blaring some George Thorogood. And then, he had exited the car with a slam, sauntered up to Miss Eichner, belched, and asked her "if the little shit was learning how to tie his shoes yet" with a hostile pessimism.
He was just there, behind her, sneering at a finger painting some child had done on construction paper, looking at it with a contempt that made his face ugly.
Karen let herself be led by Kyle, who lugubriously ran her forward, still using the pinky as a leash. His cheeks were stretched in a grin that made her realize she hadn't ever seen him so happy...
Especially not since Eric's gotten his time off, she thought, biting her thumbnail pensively...
"I can't wait to show you what I drawed for the arts fair momma," He was babbling happily. "Its a real special drawring!"
"Kyle, baby, slow down," she said with a smile, "Come on, baby, I need that arm, now show me what you did..." Although her throat was tightening up and she risked a glance back to Eric.
Because she had tried to hide it, since he'd been coming home so early, but, her boy's childish little scribbles held an indefinable, eerie power.
Her boy put art out into the world from an imagination so vivid that it manifested itself in the real world.
Her thoughts were black as she reflected on the darkness inherent in kids. Before the ages of puberty, when they're still learning a moral center, and are creatures of impulse and response. When a boy responds to the negative energy of a father who is so crude and brutish with confusion and hurt. When a boy begins to instinctually manifest guardians to fight back. It had started innocently enough... a queer little drawing of misshapen winged things with eyes and beaks turned into a flock of black razor-winged shrieking hell-birds. And that was just a childish drawing come to life.
There was worse to come, when her inventive little boy dreamed up a tableau of a gnome who cut his daddy's ties in half as some kind of juvenile, subconscious way of hurting something that was his. An act that, when discovered, came with a violent consequence, that had sent him sulking in his room for days. And drawing.
She didn't fear her son at all. Not like she did Eric when he was in his drink, or in a tacit way, like Eric feared Kyle. But she feared a childish imagination gone wrong, married to ugliness, pettiness, and a will to hurt someone who hurt him. That, she did fear.
She blinked herself out of her reverie because her little boy was standing, proudly beaming, holding his arms out the way a magician's pretty assistant would fawn over an act. Oooh, ahhh, presenting...
"Kyle, this is," she couldn't hide the shock in her voice, or the profound surprise. It was no jagged crayon razorbirds, that was true. "You made this?"
"I spent a lot of time on it!" He said cheekily, not seeing anything wrong. Eric was lurking around on the other side, muttering he needed 'nother beer for this crap. Karen turned her eyes back to study the drawing.
He had drawn, very clearly, tentacles, coming up from the ground, exploding upwards, and wiggling around a building that had, in childish swatch letters, been labelled as the school. She held the massive charcoal and pencil undertaking in both hands, looking over the tentacles, the clear gouts of flame rising from a window, and a tentacle wrapped around a mean stick man with downward slash marks over his eyes to indicate he was frowning. In the same, hand-daubed childish writing, the person wrapped in the tentacle was labelled, daddy.
And then, in the corner, was a crudely drawn, intersected pile of squares that seemed to be a car, with two heads poking up out of the bubble, reading, "Mommy an me maek hour eskap"
Her hands were trembling as she lowered the construction paper, but Kyle was looking at her with an intensity that unnerved her. It was probing, asking if she liked it, with a child's lack of empathy or ability to read distress. "I drew us, momma," he said simply, as if that was all.
"When are they gonna judge this stupid shit and hand out trophies, Karen," broke in Eric, loud and fully lacking restraint. He shifted as some kids pushed past him, laughing. "He drew one of his cute little cartoons, all the other kids did their artistes, now let's go already."
Kyle looked proud as he turned his face up to his dad and grinned, "I'm going to win the trophy this time!"
Karen, dubiously, thinking that his effort would look a bit... depraved, if not demonic, next to other first grader's macaroni pictures and drawings of butterflies done in crayon all over the map, folded it a little so her peering husband couldn't get a look at it. She had to find a way to let him know that just expressing himself and letting out his spiteful demons was a reward... maybe it would head off his darker impulses. "Now Kyle, baby," she said, eyes hooded, "you can't get every trophy, we -"
Eric snorted, and grabbed the construction paper in a roll from Karen. He grabbed his son's shoulder in a hard, demanding grip, and turned him back down the hallway, waving a hand at the other art projects. "Don't listen to her, boy. If you're in something, you have to be in to win. Every trophy. Collect every one of those little gold fuckers that's put in front of you, don't matter what they're for or how stupid they seem. Like this. Stupid little art show. Means nothing. But you draw cute little cartoons all the time. Go on and look at that trophy." What Karen didn't know, what none of them could have known, is how deeply rooted in a child's psyche could have become. But then... for as much as it seemed to Karen that her clingy little lovebug was a mommas boy... this streak that was growing inside of him, nurtured by talks like these, was more like his daddy every day.
"Go on, look at that trophy," Eric cajoled, "You think you got what it takes? Now look at that kid's painting. Look at all the colors he used. Look at how pretty it is." Eric was taking a peverse pleasure in this now; he had raised his son's ire and in his mean drunk was now on his way to smashing him. "Or that one. That one can draw human faces, not these lil stick figures you got here." He opened the construction paper. Despite missing the obvious symbolism, he pointed out the idiosyncrasies he saw in the kid's artwork. "That don't even look like a car. You think you're gonna win with that? You have to do better, son." He roughly shoved his son's shoulder. Kyle looked back at him with sullen, burning eyes.
"Do better. Always give 110%. Don't be a little faggot that accepts a consolation prize," he mocked, his voice turning snivelly, "A green wibbon for participation. Be a man. Do better."
"ERIC -" Karen raised her voice, and her husband turned to her, holding a flat hand up. "I'm trying to teach my son." His voice suddenly became jagged broken glass in a hiss, "What did I say to you about contradicting me when I'm trying to teach him a lesson. Do YOU need a lesson, Karen?"
She dropped her eyes, but she was still worried, looking over at Kyle. Kyle's eyes were burning, steaming into the construction paper his dad held in his hand.
Miss Eichner and a bald man, wearing a sweater vest and a horn-rimmed pair of specs came walking up. Karen knew him as the principal. "Is there a problem here?"
"I'm just handing out life lessons to my son, is that okay?" Eric snarled at the bald principal. "His momma's trying to teach him it's okay to be a loser."
Miss Eichner began talking to Eric in a low voice, trying to lead him down the hall.
Kyle's face was streaked and distraught, his mouth was pulled tight in a grimace. He looked on the verge of a meltdown. Every kid in the area was turning to look.
Suddenly, the building began to rock like it was in the throes of a quake. People were thrown off their feet, and the late afternoon sun was blocked from coming in through the outside windows. A few people gained their bearings, and looked around. One lady shrieked at the top of her lungs. Big, thick, inky black pseudopods were entangling themselves, slopping up the side of the building like nightmare octopus tentacles. En masse, people broke and ran in all different directions.
Karen stumbled to her feet, and she looked at the black shapes slapping against the glass windows with a dawning awe. She had never imagined something this powerful could come from an imagination.
He was bent over, every muscle in his small body tensed, tears streaming down his face. She darted over to him, putting a protective arm around him, as if to shelter him from a storm. He was just repeating the words over and over again. "I'll never win... never... never... Be a man... do better.... I'll never be a man... I'll never do better... Never!"
"Kyle!" she shouted over the rising din, "Kyle, sweetheart... listen to me! Listen to my voice!"
Down the hall, a father lifts up a crumbled scrap of construction paper, unrolls it, and then looks at it, really noticing the tentacles on it, and the figure with the mad downslashed eyes being crushed by them, for the first time. His jaw drops open.
"He's right!"... the boy wails, "Look at his paper, it's brighter than mine was!... An, an his, he uses his paper better, it looks better than what I did... I'll never be like them!... Never!..."
She uses her fingers to turn him to look at her, "You don't have to be!"
He can barely hear her over the roar of the din, "What do you mean?!"
"Those kids aren't you, baby!" She says, "They don't have your gift. They don't see things the way you do when they make their art, and that's okay. And they may not like what you do - HE," pointing a furious finger at the man depicted being strangled by a nightmare, "May not like what you do, but that doesn't mean that they're right."
The rumbling, the wind, and the cacophony all start dying down, as he looks over at her, still tearful, still unsure. People are pointing and gathering at the windows, looking at the swaying stalks.
"Just because someone criticizes your art, doesn't mean to stop making it. You make it for you. You find a way to make what you want to do on your terms," and then, grabbing him by his shoulders to reinforce this next part, "In a way that can be controlled, that you can control the imagery you put out in the world. Nobody in the world can do what you do, and that's your power, baby."
He looks over at her, his mouth turned down, very sad. "I just wanted to win us the trophy, momma, have something pretty and shiny for us..." And, in accordance to what his dad's way of thinking, whether he could articulate that or not just yet.
She hugged him so ferociously that there were tears in her eyes too. "Aw love. You're a special kid, you know that."
They were still hugging a few minutes later when the principal bustled through the hallways, herding some of the parents and teachers back towards the conference hall, "Harumph, well, yes, now that the - mass hysteria - has abated, we can all adjourn and - maybe present the winners of the art fair - Yes, I think that's best."
Karen held her hand out for the little tyke, both of them rising up. "Remember, Kyle. Just as long as you gave everything you can and knew in your heart you did what other people weren't going to do, that's all that matters."
"Right, momma," he says, returning to the brighter, sunnier kid from earlier, but his eyes look back and fix on a glass case inset in the wall. A golden trinket calls to him from within, and the boy's mouth quirks upward in a smirk. Because he knows that art for art's sake has it's merits... but it's so much more fun when you unlock the trophy, isn't it...?
