Sixty Flashes of Life

Chapter 9

Chapter 9.

[23:18]

Summer is already on the verge

Blazing sun lights paving the boy's path.

He sat there on a bench right in the middle of the park with a collection of poems gripped in his one hand, and a flashlight in the other. It was not the healthiest way how to indulge himself on reading books, but he preferred it more than listening to his mother's moans and trash talks from another of her so-called clients.

He could not blame her, though. They had lost everything they could after what his father had done. She could have lost her life, and he would become an orphan, but doctors saw her through at the right moment.

However, with that scarred face and half an ear that would stay with her for good after an assault from his father, nobody actually cared about hiring such an unrepresentative kind of employee. You can't trade face to face if your own makes people's stomachs rumble out of fear.

Still they cared. They cared no to let her come to their interviews, speak with neighborhood kids, or to have casual conversation for too long with them, for they always found reasons to leave.

She told him they cared, but in their own unique way. Eliot was not sure whether it was a total lie or she believed in it sometimes, but he came to thinking the second over time.

None of them were the plausible reasons for him to bear his mother stoop down to such disgusting disgrace, such as starting to sell one's body. Especially when it is your mother of whom the talk is about – all excuses do not seem plausible anymore, and the feeling of self-guilt only piles up.

She had no choice, and it was obvious. A child, mortgage, hospital bills to pay, food to buy and more than three thousand dollars in loans to pay off.

Too many burdens for one shoulder – especially when it is a woman's shoulder – he thought, and felt that notorious feeling raise up in his chest again, which he quickly suppressed, belittling its importance.

No choice – yes; but yet was not enough to close his eyes to it.

He raised the book once again, and directed the flashlight onto the page.

Summer is already on the verge

Blazing sun lights paving the boy's path.

Two lines that caused his body to get covered in an armor of goosebumps right away. He had racked his brains for many years, mostly starting from the high school, about uniqueness of human being. How was that even possible for a single person to write something that was so elegant and beautifully horrible simultaneously?

"Observations of human sufferings," his teacher of English literature had a say on this topic once. "A soul that lives a perfect life in perfect conditions can only be perfectly genius in anything that is far from creativity. Originality and talent come from difficult times, often caused by heavy sufferings."

For years, he considered this idea, and his observations of human sufferings led him to nothing but pain and despair of his own kind. No bestsellers. Lack of piquancy in his style. Writing still seemed mediocre.

"You need a soul in the text. Your soul. The settings, background, details, and ideas are exquisite and marvelous, but there is no spirit in the text as if it had been written by artificial intelligence with no feelings. Readers must feel the writer even behind the curtains, pulling their strings from hatred to admiration," was what his teacher said after he had read his short story as a part of his school assignment.

Maybe. He felt a need to ruminate on it a bit longer, but the poem was too breathtaking to dump.

A sudden, sharp noise of rustle went off behind his back. He jumped to his feet in a second, facing the whatever-enemy-it-might-be.

Summer is already on the verge

Blazing sun lights paving the boy's path

What is about to emerge,

Death?

The poem, although it was his alternative version, immediately flooded his mind as he stared straight into the bush. "Quit it," he commanded ruthlessly himself. Someone or something rasped out a groaning-like sound, which made him feel on the verge of—

Like nothing happened, a huge body tipped out of the bush and stumbled right in front of his legs, with its face smashing into the pavement.

"What the—," he stopped, for his brain was too bewildered to come up with anything that could make sense at that moment.

"Leave," his first urge said, "Go home, shut the door and forget that it had happened. Someone will take care of it instead of you. Are you a lifesaver after all?"

He was not.

There were no particular reasons for him to care about the man. It was another drunken who had poured too much of the poison into himself, and forgot the way home, winding up in the impassable bushes of a state park. Impassable was quite a word for three thick shrubs that lined up along the path. It was not his business after all, but—

The collection of poems that he had let out when the stranger lashed out at him lay, treacherously, next to the man's face. He almost poked it with his red nose.

A silhouette of his mother appeared in his mind, walking from house to house and asking for help; she received none, but looks full of aversion and a bunch of clever damnation.

He was not a lifesaver, yes; but, he was a human after all. It was less than a few actions not to be like them, and he was not going to...

"HELP!" A strident voice rang out behind his back, as a young girl rushed by his shoulder and bent over the man. She was a bit younger than him; her hair knotted behind her head; a red summer dress with blurry, promiscuous in the dark spots on it.

"What the hell are you doing? He is having a seizure!" She yelled at Eliot, once her eyes of sapphires color met with his. "GIVE ME A HAND!"

The last words finally snapped him back to reality. He stooped, put his hands on the man's body and helped her to roll the body on its side. It was somehow much lighter than he had expected, as if the man's body floated in the water.

"It is help, then," the voice nagged in his mind. He was there, caring after all; with some strange girl in a semi-dark park with few streetlights on helping another person, and the notorious words were stuck on his mind...

Summer is already on the verge

Blazing sun lights paving the boy's path

What is about to emerge,

Death?

Stranger, please, just take a breath.