Lucid Waking

Archive for February 6th, 2010

The Boy

        “Who is she?” the little boy asked Daniel pointing to a framed photograph on the wall.
        Daniel turned from the canvas he was painting and followed the boy’s finger before quickly answering. “No one. She’s nobody.”
        Daniel knew that wouldn’t keep the boy’s curiosity for long, but for the moment the boy was surprisingly quiet. A moment passed before he said:
        “Does she have something to do with the lady who left me here?”
        “I don’t know,” Daniel said. “And I mean it. Stop pestering me with questions of that social worker who brought you here.”
        There was another pause and then the boy said:
        “You’re lying. That lady isn’t nobody. Who is she?”
        Daniel sighed. “My late wife.”
        “Late?”
        “She died.”
        “Oh.” Silence and then, “she was very pretty. What was her name?”
        “Margaret.”
        “How’d she die?”
        “In a plane accident. She was a pilot in the war and her plane was shot down.”
        The boy didn’t answer. Daniel continued painting in silence carefully outlining the figure in front of him with a thin line of light. He didn’t want to be thinking about Margaret, but now his mind would go nowhere else. She was such a strong individual it put him to shame, but yet, she was tender when she wanted to be and it was when she wasn’t thinking about work that he loved her the most. When she died, he felt more empty than anything until the funeral and occasionally it would hit him how fragile life was and how much he missed her. The days always passed more slowly when such moods took over.
        Then there was the matter of the boy. A woman had knocked on his door several months ago and introduced herself as a social worker and claimed that this boy was his nephew, now orphaned with no other kin. But Daniel didn’t have siblings and he found it unlikely that Margaret’s entire family would be gone that he had to take care of the child. It was a peculiar situation and after a quick DNA test, he surmised that he was in no way related to the boy by blood. Yet, he didn’t want to turn the child out on the street, so he thought the boy could stay regardless of the unusual clarity of questioning the boy seemed to have for his age of seven and the even more unusual understanding he seemed to have of situations that Daniel even considered out of his grasp.
        The stool the boy was sitting on creaked as he fidgeted. Daniel knew that was his cue to clean up his paints. He glanced at the little figure that waited patiently for him to finish. Once cleaned up, he lead the boy upstairs and fed him lunch. Daniel sat down across from him and watched quietly contemplating.

Author’s comments on post 348: I’ve been very busy these last few days and been doing my best to write every day. This doesn’t mean I necessarily get a chance to edit what I’ve written and publish it within a timely manner. Bare with me and trust that I am writing and I will post more than three posts this month.