Painful Love

Family Line

Alec was dragging the bag of trash, it somehow seemed to weigh more than him; which would be something completely possible, considering just how thin and small Alec still was. The four-year-old made it outside the building with the bag filled with empty bottles, cigarettes, and plastics, mostly.

He had to leave the bag next to the dumpster, since he wasn't tall enough to actually open it and throw the trash inside. He looked behind himself. Nobody. It was late at night, ungodly hours a kid shouldn't be out, but Robert had been especially rough with Alec's mother and Alec had been kicked out of the room, so he had decided to do something that wouldn't give his father another reason to beat him up.

His eyes darted around, focusing on the floor around him. People were always leaving valuable items near dumpsters. Alec had once found a stuffed animal, without an arm. He had felt horrible for the poor stuffed elephant, which had been thrown away for not being good enough. He still had it, hidden behind his headboard, where his father would never bother checking for things to destroy.

Alec checked around the dumpsters, but there was nothing worth keeping. Some clothes, CDs, a ragged doll Alec almost took back with him, but he didn't want to risk his father finding him with that. He didn't have toys, he knew people in his school had those, because they talked about it.

Alec tried fitting in. He tried really hard. Whether it was the occasional bruise on his arm, or his stutter, or his way of doing things, he didn't really have someone to call a friend. The rest of the four-year-olds seemed to have different interests. Alec liked cats and animals. He liked looking up at the sky and seeing stars at night. He read. Nobody else in his class enjoyed reading, which turned him into the weird kid.

He read about planets, simple astronomy for kids, about stars. He found out there were things called constellations, black holes, shooting stars. It made Alec feel weird to know about those, because it was as though he was nothing compared to the whole universe.

He stopped reading. If reading made him be the weird kid and not have any friends, he didn't want to read anymore. He tried talking, instead, and he attempted to talk to a pretty boy in his class about the information he had read about.

His stutter had made it almost impossible for him to communicate properly, especially because he got nervous when the pretty green-eyed boy frowned at him, which ended up in him being left out again. He didn't try again. Once was enough, if one person hadn't liked him, why would the rest?

He sometimes stood close to groups of kids, listening to their games and conversations. It was that way that he found out his father's behavior wasn't normal. Other kids' parents didn't seem to hurt them. They seemed to be nice, they didn't make their children bring them alcohol.

He found out as well that he wasn't normal either. Nobody appeared to count stairs as they went up, or go back down if the number felt wrong. Nobody cleaned their hands that often. Nobody felt the urge to suddenly start counting until it felt right.

Alec began spending his free time at school in the toilets, with toys he knew he never would have in his house, lining them up and reading stories to them. He liked stuffed cats, elephants, and kangaroos. He read information about the universe to them, because they wouldn't judge him for it and whenever someone came into the toilets, he stopped talking and waited until they left.

Alec soon learned that nobody wanted to be friends with a weird kid.

The blue-eyed boy went back inside the building. His parents wouldn't be happy to have him outside unsupervised for too long. He had left the door slightly ajar, so that he wouldn't have to bother his father.

There was silence in the apartment. Alec didn't like it. He closed the door and that sole thing seemed to awake the noise.

"USELESS CUNT!"