Almost a Child

by Jeff Bendeigid

Almost a child, came through the Veil, carrying his heart in his hands.

He was slipping off again. Hurrying into that unformed land of muffled lights and stained glass sound, where broken bits of this and that are reassembled by the wind from a dragonflys wing. Out of the room where beauty can edge quickly into terror.

His eyes had become two slashes of chalk violating the rigid muscles of his face. He floated behind a hardened smile of enormous loneliness and the anguished, why Me's of torments handed down that only the Big People Saints could know the why of.

He wasnt quite at the emptiness is form and form emptiness place yet. His brain sputtered colorful showers of sparks. He was decidedly pre-rational.

Kneeling on the hard grains of rice engaged his ability to see. In drawing away from the pain blossoming between the polished, hardwood floor and his chubby knees he found gate money for his rite of passage.

A crack in the wall before his bad luck face opened its lips and, grinning, exposed a birth canal to freedom. Flexing a muscle he didnt know he had, he grew the crack until it was a doorway.

A small, smelly thought disturbed his concentration. Vaguely he thumbed past the psychologists, doctors and teachers who had begged him to say the bad words that would send him straight to hell. He smiled, remembering how he had dreamed them away with fictional accounts of black and white TV shows, Scooby Doo and almost free long distance. Beyond the crinkled white curtains of emergency rooms and canned air fichus tree waiting rooms, he had focused all of his energy to wind protection around his Big People Saints. He had vanished into the dark gate to home that peeped between the skirted knees of his lady doctor. Crawlspace away from inquiring minds, mysterious accidents, burns, contusions and fretful professionals who cooed and cajoled him to do the unthinkable, say the impossible.

Like he could be tricked into that! He had learned too much too early and he was, after all, a good little boy. He knew of a place to hide secrets.

He emptied himself for his journey into that place below his belly button. He had to make himself very flat to get through. The warm place at his solar plexus began to squeeze out his emotions with a hiss and a pop. All the connecting fibers to what was behind him had to go. Sing a song of dissociation; all my ducks are in a line.

He made himself so flat there was no room for the red hurting in his knees. No room at the Inn for the angry words, fists and feet his Saints threw at him like bricks. He flattened his lungs and evicted the confusion of purple marks on his little boy skin.

It wasnt enough to just go. He had to get the hell out of Dodge. Away from the fatal peril, the bead rattling and his own voice chanting Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

He was spitting out bees, hacking them up from his lungs. He was a hive and they all wanted his honey. They had already taken too much, had already dug out his fragile honeycomb and sweet, golden harvest with garden trowels and lacquered fingernails.

Finally, completely flat, he sailed after the last of the bees through the crack in the crumbling, plaster wall. He flew through parting veils and scampered through hedgerows following his reward. He found refuge.

He grew native to no simple hallucination, no benign fugue. He initiated himself by walking deliberately through the abattoir of family-home-night. He ran through a parking garage chased by angels. He saw red snails on the underside of clouds, his parents resting quietly at the bottom of a lake. He saw Vikings, valentines, vampires and something called a donkey-bar in a place called Tijuana.

In his exodus, he came to rest in a desert. He sat on a narrow path made by years of bare feet and hooves. The night sky opened impossibly wide above him.

He met a dung beetle sitting on its turd ball, expressively farting at the moon. The cocky beetle turned to address him, saying, Being and nothingness, go figure!

Following back the old scarabs tracks, he came to linger in the desert. There, dark, naked people taught him how to squint his eyes almost, but, not quite closed, unfocussed, watching the horizon. Sitting quietly, letting the bugs and the daylight crawl over him, he watched the distant line for that brief interruption that would tell him an animal or person was approaching.

All the way out there, he lived three complete lives with the dark, naked people. He learned to paint on the rocks, to hear snakes underground and how to smell water that was two hundred miles away. He forgot what forgetting meant.

One day he followed a smell, a deep salt-water smell, until he came to a sea. The Sun was dropping into the water. The drowning Sun filled him with fear.

Running to save it, he followed the wide beach, little waves nibbling at his feet, licking away his footprints. His eyes on the receding sun, he did not see, and almost fell into, a deep hole in the sand.

It was a well, opening in the center of a rough circle made of driftwood, dried kelp and stones. He peered in and saw deep down in the darkness of the well a small, faint glow. He trotted nervously around the rim, tracing the lip of the pit, singing a little song like the mewing of a cat.

She did not walk up or climb out of the well. No smoke or pyrotechnics announced her. She was just, all of a sudden, there. There as She had always been there, having only shifted from wasnt to was.

In a very small voice he said, Uh-oh.

When she spoke, the sibyls voice was the oceans whisper; a breeze shivering dead leaves on a tree. Her long, thin fingers were knotty, gnarled twigs, waving and poking at the night.

She said, You are the broken bone, the wound that is always healing but will never be allowed to close. You are the gate to those mysteries all posses but have lost the knack of. You are duende, a gateway and a ghost.

He swallowed in a dry throat as she tittered and gamboled in ungainly parody of a young girls dance, holding up her skirt and stepping lightly round the rim of the well. Once, twice, and three times around, weaving a web, sewing her net. She made a dream-catcher for harvesting the shadows, the sun and the boy.

The death crone patted the child at her knee. Her rattling twig fingers wound into his curls, laying blessings and a mothers caress where none had ever been.

It was enough. He knew. He could see both inside and outside now. He could lift the skin off the world and soothe the inner workings with his breath. He disappeared the distance between himself and all objects, between himself and the Great Nest of Being.

He dissolved hierarchy, hatred and all forms of punishment like sugar in a glass of water. His lips stretched and his jawbone cracked and popped.

His ribs answered to a deep thrumming, rising like smoke from the pit. Too large to be held, he opened like praying hands. His beautiful, wounded heart glistened wetly in the night air, answering a forlorn voice, an echo, and a mind seal of emptiness.

Having become the promise of the crones deliberate narcosis, his chalk eyes gazed inward. He fell forward and lay quite still.

His chubby arms and legs gestured in still summons to the five elements. His trembling done, his spirit flew like a bird through an open window.

His him all poured out, a small trickle of spit fell as silent rain onto the polished, hardwood floor. Nine grains of uncooked brown rice were pressed deeply into his knees, and, above the tumbled, little boy leftovers, a tiny crack marred the wall.

After many years of battling addiction and its related, Jeff who is a sexual abuse and poverty survivor writes to resist, dream and thrive