Little Rock

Chapter 1

"Seven Seas of Rhye" echoed on a continuous loop with three other songs in the damp, dark garage. Elijah pulled the landline back up to his ear, the voice on the other line still incessantly rambling, and had been for the past five minutes.

    "I'm just saying, Eli. Queen is great, but they aren't the best," he repeated for the fifth time during the conversation. He was insisting that Elijah admitted that his choice of music was better.

    "Russo will you shut the hell up already? I already told you that Queen is better than any of the crappy garage music that you listen to." Elijah took a look around at where he was sitting. The light bulb blinked in and out of function, the only real light provided to the room stemmed from three small windows. He stood up with a grunt and began walking around, the cord tethered to the landline stiffening to remind him that he couldn't walk too far away. With his parents permission he had completely redecorated the garage into a grunge hangout; the only piece of furniture in it was an old dusty leather couch that his granddad planned on throwing out.

    "I gotta go do my homework, man, I'll see you at school tomorrow." He hit the light switch and the room went dim again as Russo said his goodbyes on the other line.

"Hopefully you get a sense of music overnight."

    A dull buzzing tone filled Elijah's ears and he could only scoff in response. Gonna kick his ass tomorrow, he thought. He gently pulled the needle from the vinyl and placed the record carefully back in its case. He was especially delicate with the album. It was a holy grail to him, he idolized Queen; and Queen, their debut album, was a masterpiece. He walked inside and the aroma of hours of cooking hit his nose. He pulled his leather jacket from his slim frame because the interior of the house was much warmer than the garage.

    A voice rang from a couple of rooms away, "Elijah, honey, is that you?" The voice increased in volume gradually until his mother turned the corner wiping her hands off with a towel. "You usually stay up all night listening to that loud music." Her cheery expression fell from her face and she took a look to examine her son. Eli trained his eyes on hers, and they kept meeting repeatedly; she was expecting him to be stoned. She probably didn't know that he knew, but he knew.

    "Yeah, well." He looked around and sniffed the air dramatically. "I gotta be up early in the morning. What's for dinner, beef? Smells like beef." He walked around her and started toward the staircase. He felt his mother's towel strike playfully against the back of his t-shirt and her joyous laugh followed him.

"Hurry up and get ready for dinner, I've got to be out at the hospital early tonight, someone called out. Flu."

Elijah just nodded his head even though he was already well up the stairs and walking into his room. He kicked his boots off and felt the carpet between his toes, wiggling them subconsciously. He walked into the bathroom and ran a hand through his short, dark brown locks. As always, he stopped in the mirror and took a moment to admire himself, not out of vanity, but genuine curiosity. At 16, it seemed like he was growing more and more every day. Of course, that's how they describe puberty in sex-ed., but he hadn't really taken the lessons into consideration. Always too busy scribbling doodles or food-for-thought poetry in his notebook.

Elijah's pale skin had freckled unnaturally under the mercy of the burning heat of the sun during the summer. He found solace in the fact that since autumn was rolling around in a couple of days, he would recover his untouchable, flawless skin. He hadn't gotten a single pimple during his course of puberty, so far, and he doesn't plan to. Then again, nothing really did go the way you wanted it to in Little Rock. Little Rock, Arkansas, Elijah thought to himself with a trickling chuckle and a final shake of his short, muddy dark hair before shutting the bathroom door to drain the lizard.