Setting: A young Luke approaches the stuffed-animal lined path to his mother's house.

Explanation: whim of the author, one shot

Chinese Curtains

by Skadi*IdiosyncraticInk

"Hope is the denial of reality."

-Margaret Weis

Here comes dawn (a traitorous thing, born of its own dead mother) and here comes noon (a vicious thing with a burning and justified hatred) and here comes evening (a despairing thing with the depression of a planned death upon its shoulders), and with it comes the little boy (yet little is not the right word, too big its definition, but artistic license is a cruel law) who walks up a grey path to a shut door hung with curtains of Chinese newspaper.

(He does not know they are not Chinese, but he never learned and never will.)

He passes each protector (though they do little to guard against the physical) and pats each one on their soft head (their heads are stuffed with beans, but they ward well against the nightmares of the insane) and is wary of forgetting one (for their wrath is terrible if inequality is dealt). He tiptoes as he nears the door (he is frightened, and it shows, but he will grow to slip it under a façade of iron) and he can smell cookies from beyond the door (she has left them burning, once more, and he will have to swallow them.)

A shadow passes back and forth behind the curtains (the clang of metal and absentminded merry humming following) and they flutter (yet they are inside.)

(Perhaps she once knew the curtains were not Chinese, but she doesn't know now and she never will.)

He is sick of chocolate (he always will be, and when he meets the girl, she will agree with him for reasons of just as dark a quality) and peanut butter (the girl will disgust him later by eating it by the spoonful to spite yet another cold memory, her way of spitting on life) and wishes they would disappear (the word forever is still in his vocabulary, but it will never be there again.) He pauses for a moment (though moment, too, is imprecise, and leaves the imagination much more liberty than any author should rightly want to deal) to stare at the sun (be it watching, screaming, dying, or dead) and wonder if his protectors will guard against the person behind the curtains (the answer is not mine to give, and neither is it his to receive).

(Once the answer to the language of the curtains was right before his eyes, but he chose not to look.)

Before he puts foot onto the steps (they are worn and bent of the times he has left, which are more than the times he has returned) he lets himself ponder who he will love when he is older (for his head is still full of the childhood promises of happy endings and true love and blue eyes).

(All promises must be broken, but the curtains have made no promise and yet we assume.)

He has read about princesses (long ago he learned that their tales are fantasy, because beauty is not real) and hopes he never meets one (he has realized it's just a polite name for insane, like his mother), but he wishes he might love someone at least pretty in the future (ominous, for he never considered anyone pretty and only one person beautiful, and even then they too were "hellish.")

(Kissing them is as different as the newspaper curtains and a Chinese newspaper-one an unintentional lie and the other an ignored truth.)

The second for which he pauses (which seems to stretch until his death) is filled with anxiety for what he must expect behind the curtains (and all the time that is to come after.)

(The curtains are not Chinese, and neither one of them will accept it.)

He question things a lot, he does, but he tends not to notice what should be questioned (because we are blind to our own guilty actions) and only what is ordinary (the common is terrifying because it always happens, always hidden from accustomed eyes) and perhaps that is why he is wiser than most (or it might just be how often he hears screams and how often he screams himself, for children such as he do not often know the agony and terror he knows on a daily routine.)

(The issue with the curtains is that he never thought to answer them and the girl never knew the question.)

When he does walk forward, his eyes are shut (in the wise knowledge that ignorance makes invisible.) and he is thinking many things (there is a swim party at school and the library wants him to pay his fines and his duct taped shoes are splitting again and wouldn't the yard look nice with a Russian cherry tree?) but the one thought that he is not thinking is that he is coming home (he has never thought it, and he does not notice it's absence.) He is coming back to her and her insanity and her burning cookies and peanut butter sandwiches (home is a foreign word he never learned to pronounce, and that he shares with the girl.)

(This tale only gets darker and the lies deeper, so I will stop here before you realize I am telling the story of your life.)

Stats: 874 words; no genre; Luke, May Castellan, Thalia