Flight School: Hunter

DO NOT OPEN

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

__________________________

Luka Sullivan did not start off tall and intimidating.

"This one's going to have all them friends." He'd listened to the officer's laugh, then. Oblivious to what he was getting himself into but not really getting himself into, just letting himself get into or...being forced into whatever it was he was letting himself get into.

The Juvenile Residential Facility was a bunch of dull buildings cordoned off by towering gates topped with barbed wires and a view that was really just trees and nothing else. He could not quite remember how he got to the facility in the first place; if there was a road or a path leading towards it; if there was a road or path at all in a place so forgotten and hidden from the rest of the world. Should the path be present, however, would he find it in himself to follow it back home?

"And what are you here for?"

The boy beside him was covered in tattoos and stitches from his wrist all the way up his forearm. Luka did not want to know how that had happened.

"I don't know," he had answered, quite honestly for there was nothing else to say. Not even lies filled a cage so empty. Not even flies.

"That's some bullshit," he'd laughed, and the others around them snickered as well, kicking him under the table after sizing him up. "You're fucking puny. Can't see you doing anything 'ther than baking some. What'd you smoke to get here?"

The boy was scrawny but the boy was ten. There was nothing unusual about being scrawny at ten, or at least that was what Luka had tried to tell himself until he began to realize that it did not matter very much to him. Nothing appeared to matter very much anymore.

There was nothing left to care about.

Not the dirty work that they'd left him to do; not the toilet he was forced to clean; the pleasant way others would get his attention—grabbing his hair and jerking backwards, and certainly not how he appeared in the eyes of others. Luka would fall, then. Like he had that one time.

That one, great fall.

*

"You're still here?" A man whose face he'd forgotten was speaking to him in a strange manner. As though Luka was a puppy that had turned into a dog against all odds and had not yet been beaten into oblivion. "Thought they'd put you up elsewhere by now."

The boy did not understand what he meant by the words 'by now', nor was he aware that he'd completed his sentence of two years at the facility and was now creeping into his third, extending every second within dull, grey walls with rust and algae lining the edges of the floor and window panes—sealed from the outside.