Spontanéité

Juniper // word portrait

This is something else I also wrote for Literature in 2016. We were requested to write a character description using Dickens' style, from Great Expectations. (Recognise a touch of Jaggers and Havisham, anyone?) Again, it could be better, and it might be a little hard to read (sorry), but it stays as is.
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Sprawled on the grass with his back leaned against a long-dead tree, a boy was sleeping, his youthful countenance innocent and pale-skinned with freckles scattered haphazardly all over, his fair hair disheveled. As I was wondering what it was such a child, perhaps only six years old or younger, was doing sleeping in such a public place, a small park usually only occupied by dogs and local residents, perhaps a stray cat, the child awoke, and I started. He immediately fixated on me a glowering scowl, his previously angelic childish countenance twisted into an expression of accusation. I felt peculiarly guilty of everything I had ever done in that instant, yet thankfully, the feelings of guilt vanished as quickly as they had appeared. He remained staring at me, however, and I wondered again what business he had sleeping here. He spoke, suddenly. He told me his name was Juniper and that he was eight years of age. I refused to believe his being named after a shrub, and he fixed upon me that same glare. His abnormally large and wide eyes were grey and cold as stone, but he retained the same appearance of pure innocence as he softened again, dismissing me as older than he and therefore stupid, clearly unable to understand his world. It was almost as if he were older than me, and as if he were almost twice my age, and as if he pitied me for being crippled by my age and inability to understand. His apparel, white and faintly grey clothing stained all over with grass, I questioned, but silently. He appeared to have the ability to make one feel guilty and worthy of prison when he clapped his dark gaze on them. He was the strangest child I had ever met. I saw him more than once after that perplexing first encounter, in the afternoons on the weekends, and he was often sleeping against the same tree I had found him lying against, that first time. Sometimes he would lie on his back, his soft stone gaze watching the sky and discovering its secrets, though he never shared those secrets with me. The clouds trusted him to keep them to himself, he said. Once I had found him shrieking in boyish laughter as he pursued a black bird, the bird screaming and losing feathers in its haste to flee. It was the most uncanny thing I had ever seen, to see him acting his age. I questioned whether the child was real, sometimes, and I never did have an answer. He never told me why he wore the same garments every time I saw him, or why he slept in the park by the tree. The only things I knew about him were that his real name was Michael Dane, he was eight years old as of July, and he called himself by the name of Juniper because he always slept against a tree by that name. While he was most likely wrong, I believed him. He told me I was the only person who called him by that name, and the only person who understood him, though I never did, and he knew so.