Butcher Boy

Pick Fowler watched them from his bedroom window. They wound their way through the busy intersection parting traffic as they went. Sage led the way bellowing and gesturing wildly. Elmo followed close behind with his arms flapping and windmilling in response to Sage's bombasts. Pick couldn't hear them, but he was familiar with their chorus. He sat looking right through these men, through their disease and back around again inside his own head. Behind his eyes it lay, rumbling like a distant thunderstorm.

He dreamt once that he clambered up the side of his own face and into the side of his eye to float in a pool of his own tears. He remembered sitting in the pool of tears waiting for his own self to blink to trigger the next event. While waiting, he watched himself staring at a mysterious and beautiful young girl he thought he knew but wasn't sure from where. She combed her long blonde hair in front of a mirror with her back to him. She suddenly caught sight of his reflection in the mirror and dropped her brush with a casual, deliberate response of surprise.

He blinked and that's when he was propelled inside-behind his eye and into darkness to confront it. It reared itself up within a fiercely bright white light. Many tentacles of glinting silver shot from it then receded into the black, icy folds of his tortured mind. He remembered struggling to awake from this dream with his vision skewed and frozen and his subconscious still snared within the terrible dream. When he finally fully awoke, he was aware of some unsettling transformation.

Pick got a job as a butcher’s assistant at the local grocer for two reasons. One, his father, Bobby, had insisted on it. "Time's come," Bobby told his wife, Sara. "Besides, he's wasting away hangin round here all summer like a government employee. Brooding on that couch all day’s leavin a lump on it that won’t smooth out. Roscoe’ll take him on sure as hell. Believe I’ll call’m up." Two, Pick saw doors swing open each time he contemplated getting a job-doors leading to answers to vague questions facing him. So, Pick spoke with Roscoe on the phone the following day after Bobby had and a deal was struck. Pick would work four days a week, eight hours a day until school started back up.

Sara breathed easier now that Pick’s attention would now turn to a job. Careful observance of the boy the past several weeks caused her some concern. She didn’t let on to Bobby because she couldn’t bring forth any hard evidence and that’s what Bobby needed before indicting the boy on any charge. "For Chrissakes, Sara, he’s a teenager," he would say and the boy would be instantly vindicated.

Pick wasn’t a sullen or distant boy by nature. Introspective, yes, but that was a sign she believed to be of intelligence. Recently though, her intuition began leading her down dark alleys where formless, yet disturbing images of Pick entered her mind. Take this conversation occurring the other day at the breakfast table:

"Mama, what do suppose the government would do if’n, say, Sage and Elmo where to murder a whole lotta people? Some sorta crime spree where they took to the streets with guns...uh no, machetes or sumthin and began hackin folks up."

"Jesus Christ, son!" Bobby interrupted while sitting at the table reading his newspaper. "That ain’t no valid sceNARio!" he drawled with a lengthy nasal tone. "Those boys ain’t right. Judged by different standards." He shook his paper to punctuate his point and continued reading.