Silver
The crowd on the street represented a fierce weakness in the face of the unknown. They might claim to understand, to know, but they didn’t know anything at all and for that nothing knew them. They were stranded and, unconsciously, they knew it; and for that they felt the need to maim anything at all that was beyond their understanding.
“Just let him go!” Throat ragged, lungs winded, purple dreads continued to pray that they let the boy go.
And then the boy did the only thing he could. He touched the jutting elbows of the man who held him and…
The jolt of pain that coursed through the Willard’s body was so great that he was forced to let the boy go. Immediately, slumping to his knees, his body jerked and spasmed.
“What choo done to ‘em boy?!” A faceless member of the crowd.
“Run!” Purple dreads grabbed the boy by the back of the shirt and dragged away from the approaching crowd.
“Get ‘im!” Willard William screamed to the crowd.
And then Billy Lumpkin spoke up because he knew something about the kid the rest of them didn’t. “Let ‘em go,” he pleaded. “Just let ‘em go. Come on back inside for the second half.”
“But…” Willard’s voice raked against the back of his throat.
“Just… come on.”
5
The ceiling swirled in the dusky half-light of the bedroom.
Ewen, smelling of beer and sweat, snored repetitiously beside Isolde. She looked at the silhouette of his broad forehead and protruding, Roman nose and she knew that she couldn’t stay here much longer. For one thing she hadn’t slept all night; not to mention her mind feeling riddled by demons and human dramas beyond her comprehension. Something happened at the carnival that she couldn’t explain. She couldn’t even explain how she’d gotten home. She’d come out of the tent feeling in a heavy daze and then… and then there was Ewen on the couch with Louis and Bob watching the game.
But she needed to remember. She needed to remember this more than anything else because her life depended on it.
Isolde had never taken religion all that seriously. Her parents, a pair of black sheep as far as the town was concerned, never bothered with church every Sunday. Both parents, having lived through the sixties and the advent of free-love and psychedelic meanderings, believed that every man was God in his own way. ‘We’re all creative,’ Isolde’s mother used to stay. ‘Creating our own worlds and sometimes remaining there.’ They couldn’t even fathom the idea that people went crazy. Instead, they simply crossed over. ‘Reality just isn’t that simple,’ her father would tell her.
And he was right. Reality wasn’t that simple. In fact, reality could be a fucking mess.
