fifty-two : the wild boy

The Child awoke in the early morning. He watched from the corner of his eye as the Man pushed himself up from his straw bed and moved to the low bench, where he sat each day to trace his thoughts onto parchment. The Child had watched him before as he sat here. The first time, not long after the Child had been herded and captured like a deer, he had watched with fear. The roll of thick, yellowed parchment gave off the familiar scent of goatskin, and he wondered if the Man would skin him to make more when the roll ran out. For those first few weeks he breathed only through his mouth, avoiding the smell.

Weeks on, the Child was watchful but unafraid. He sat in his corner, watching as the Man scratched lines onto the paper and listening to the hollow clink of the pen on the jar of dark liquid. He allowed himself to breathe through his nose, just once. With the dip of the Man’s pen into the jar, a warm, metallic smell drifted across the room and the Child’s nostrils had flared. He wanted that smell. It stirred something in him, it’s sweetness burned in his mind. Days later, when the Man left to help the women with their garden, the Child had crept across the floor on all fours to sniff at the bench. He came close to discovering the contents of the jar, but heard the Man’s steady footfalls returning and quickly retreated to his corner, the smell a distant ache in his memory.

Now, the Child lay silent in the half-darkness, feeling the familiar bristle of rushes against his bare skin, and watched, waited. The smell hit him again and his body stiffened. The Man heard the shift of rushes, looked over his shoulder and spoke, a short word in a low voice. He smiled hopefully, but the Child shut his eyes and turned away. After a moment, the clink and the scratch and the smell came again. This time the Child was ready, and he lay still as he savoured the scent.

Finally, after several long minutes and waves of the smell on the air, the Man was finished. He grunted to his feet, strode across the room and then away, beyond the rough mud wall. A minute passed. The footsteps quieted, too far now for the Child to hear, and he sat up, alert and watchful, waiting for the sound to suddenly reappear. Two minutes. Nothing. The Child was alone.

He moved slowly, cautiously, inching his way from the corner to the bench, painfully aware of the noise he made with every shift of dirt beneath his feet. He stopped, once, twice—expecting to be caught in a half-crouch with his sights firmly set on the jar—but the Man was still away, down in the garden or by the river. At the bench he stopped again. He could smell the liquid, faint but still sharp, mingling with the goatskin parchment, and his pulse raced.

He reached for the jar with shaking fingers. A beetle dropped from the thatched grass roof to the bench with a soft thud, and he froze. He watched with his hand outstretched as it wriggled around on its back, trying to right itself, then with a sharp movement batted it onto the floor. It landed on its feet and scurried into the Man’s straw pallet. The Child’s eyes flicked from the pallet to the doorway, and again he listened. No footsteps came. Finally his fingers closed around the jar, and to his surprise it was cool to the touch, with no trace of the scents warmness on its surface. He held it high like a trophy, and brought it down to his face, breathing deeply. The smell up close was much stronger, almost cloyingly sweet. It burned his nose, but he held it still just millimetres from his face, breathing it in again. The metallic smell was stronger here too, but there were more scents, one almost like the air before rain, another like stone, another like nothing he had smelt before. He picked up the pen from the bench, as he had seen the Man do each morning, and after two or three failed attempts he clumsily dipped it into the top of the jar and swirled it around. When he lifted the pen, an almost black, sticky liquid dripped from the end. He sniffed again at the pen, and then, without any thought into the matter, stuck out his pink tongue and pressed the nib right onto it. The taste was faint, somehow familiar, and he put the pen back before tipping the jar to his mouth. Much stronger now. An unpleasantly metallic taste filled his mouth and he threw the jar back to the bench, where it landed on its side. The syrupy blue-black contents glugged slowly out onto the wood, making tiny rivulets in the grain. A low whimper escaped his lips, as he worked his mouth frantically, trying to dispel the taste, then froze. Footsteps. Slow, heavy footsteps. The Man.

He scurried back to his corner, his mouth still opening and closing, his blue tongue darting like a lizard’s, and sat with his back to the wall and his arms wrapped around his knees. A few seconds passed, and the Man came into the room, his hair wet and matted to his head. He paused for a split second when he saw the upturned jar on the bench, then with a barely perceptible flick of his eyes to the Child, moved forward and mopped it up with a handful of straw. He sat again and began to write. The Child made another low, involuntary noise, and the Man turned to look at him. The Child’s reptilian tongue still twitched in and out of his mouth, and he froze under the Man’s gaze, terrified. Hair bristled along the back of his neck, and he waited for anger. But the Man’s face lit up. He grinned, held back a laugh which stopped audibly in his throat with a sound almost like a snort, and turned back to his parchment.

The Child calmed himself and lay back on the rushes. This time he breathed only though his mouth.

This isn’t new, but I ran out of time… A little bit of background on this piece; Last semester I read David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life for my Literature for Writers class. For the assessment task, we had the choice of writing an analytical essay or a creative response. I had planned to write an essay, but two days before it was due I ended up writing this. Basically, I made up a new scene to precede the moment in the book when the poet Ovid (the Man) returns to his room to find the Child (a wild boy who has been brought back to the village) has blue ink on his tongue.