Running with Donny Hue

chapter one

It was the year 2045 and Donny Hue had just solved the equation. He could run for miles without getting tired. I'll spare you the mystery; the trick was to get chased by something deadly.

The strange thing about Donny Hue was we never saw anyone as safe as that boy. Even after the third world war, his daddy had made a fortune for himself dealing with gold and water and such riches our own parents and grandparents weren't awfully interested in at the time they were alive..

The teachers and such say the early years of this century was the peak of capitalism. The height of humanity. The world in the west had used up all the peace. Now when Donny Hue and his daddy go on and pass us in town, wearing those rich people clothes and always smell so darn nice. I can't help but curse at my lucky parents who made an unlucky world for a lucky to be alive kid. Problem was, I didn't believe in luck and neither did Donny.

That's how we met. Running our morning trails through the woods in Old Town Skevi, some bomb residue could still be found so we always kept to the trail. And seeing as we were the only two runners. It pegged for a fated chance, we would meet. Me running towards something, slow and deliberate. Donny, running from something, fast and clumsy. But fast. Oh darn was he fast. 

"Ive never seen a girl run?" He said, the sun in his eye so he squinted looking down at me with that carefree smile of his.

"Well you must be blind, Donny Hue."

"Nah I couldn't be."

"Donny why are you so mean?"

"Cause I have everything. Don't you know when you have everything you don't have to be nice?"

"You're an arrogant little boy."

"And you like me." He teased me and ran away, leaving a shadow behind. He was right oh God, he was right I never did love a boy as much as I loved Donny. But It wasn't until the day he lost his fortune; his eyesight and his legs when a bomb, too close to the trail he happened to misstep blew up underneath him, took him away from the woods, forever.

He burned off the lower half of his body and his fathers fortune became a prerequisite to the backdrop of the story he never got to become. The Lucky Boy. It is said he sits by the window sometime and looks over at nothing, just to feel the sun in his face. Just to feel something alive.

His father survived a war for a son that couldn't survive peace. The strongest men breed the weakest sons, his father said. 

The townhouse of the Hue Estate is empty, albeit a nanny the father has paid money to take care of. And as the years have gone by even the sun has finally stoped seeing him. Now all that is left of Donny Hue, the fastest boy I ever saw was the silent right glance to a beautiful house no one ever visits.

The rich don't have many friends of cripples after all, sympathy is a wealth blessed to the poor which is why Ramona Geriat, the nanny has stayed by his side for so long, in spite of the lousy pay and anger outbreaks she says he gets when she touches him too much.

He's afraid of the dark, she says to the girls who hang around to listen when she has her morning coffee on her way back home to the kids for the night. I always catch her when I return from my runs. Not to listen, for I've made anger a child to care for whenever I stay and listen to the gossipers speak of pain they never experienced.

It is one of these times, this July month,  Ramona looks especially tired from her nightshift when the cafe is empty for we've come right at opening hour that she turns to me with the dark circled eyes of a worked down woman she asks me, kindly, for Ramona was always kind to me.

"Say, Sally-Anne would you be a doll and run out to Donny Hue and fetch me my pair of pretty gloves. I've left them there you see and my husband is taking me out for some supper tonight and I'd do awfully well to look pretty."