The Boy and the Beast (Americanized)

Chapter 1

If some day you should visit Phoenix, Arizona in the year 2009, you could hear the sound of Michael Crawford singing "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" from the 1969 movie musical adaptation of Hello Dolly! playing on a television screen at the local Best Buy, drowned out by the cacophony of cars, buses, pedestrians and trams passing by. You could gaze at the beautiful Native American artwork at the Phoenix Art Museum or explore the mysteries of science at the science museum, visit events at the Convention Center or spend a lazy dinner at the Sun Dial on the very top of the Hyatt Regency Hotel on North Second Street. If you wanted to look for an alternative to Broadway at ASU Gammage, visit the Orpheum Theater, or if you wanted to collect an insurance that will secure your future, go to Chase Tower, the tallest building in Phoenix. Or...if there was ever a good school to study at, just apply yourself at Brophy College Prep on Central Avenue.

But all the same, it was a country waiting for the Great Recession and the War on Terrorism to end. Barack Obama had just been sworn in as the first African-American to become President of the United States and he was doing his best to improve the lives of those who were suffering under cruelty, racism, despair, poverty, hunger, and total indifference in a political climate that was beginning to degenerate back to 1964, before Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech outlawed racism for good. Hollywood may have done it's best to provide the public with the distraction of sweet escapism, but there was one boy who could never find any comfort from that or Obamacare.

His name was Ronald Kleine.

Ronald Kleine was a carefree boy, but one from another world. Born in Phoenix in 2000 and raised on stories of ancient monsters who fought against evil and the gallantry of classic animated features, his mother Irena and his father Nicholas often took him to many places on hot days where they could just go inside and cool off under the comfort of air-conditioning. On cooler days they would take him to all the houses where wealthy people once lived in governing the land. They taught Ronald of the world of the people who lived in those times in a more entertaining way than what his own schools had to offer.

Other details aside, Ronald lived in a secure world, unaware of it's evils. Little did he know that someday, his world was going to explode underneath him, and only God would help him if he didn't have some kind of weapon to help him face the new world with valor instead of anger. He would have to learn something that would stay with him for the rest of his life, because a little boy's hands isn't worth being weak, but being strong. Strong enough to carry his lifespan as far as it could go.

On his education, Ronald grew up, steeped in the history of America, but he was also a child of the 2000s. A friendly boy, a gamer, a fun-loving student who helped his classmates with their homework, ready to feed his pet Terrier, climb up a tree or interview his extended family members about the old days.

His mother's family, the Jewish clan Hazeltov, was opposed to that of his father's Catholic family and how their lifestyle seemed cheap and hopeless compared to the successes that they were in their highfalutin lifestyles. But as long as they were around Ronald, an attentive and humorous child who was always the center of attention, there was peace in every location that held family gatherings.

Like so many other boys, Ronald was drawn to opposites in women, especially since his eldest cousin Margaret married a charming young drifter named Richard. But he drank so much that she divorced him after a year, and this saw a darker turn in the family. While Margaret moved to Tucson in search of another husband (she had little success in finding one), the Hazeltovs turned full fury on Nicholas and his hungry hippo family of Germans who opposed their kind during the 19th century before Nicholas' great-grandparents moved to Baltimore before the war. Nicholas wasn't fat, mind you, since he wanted to physically distance himself from his portly family, but he loved them just the same. He wanted to prove to them that he was hard-working and a man of many things that women in their philosophy couldn't offer.