He Entered Alone And Unafraid

Four fingers. Four fingers silhouetted in the bright blue water, rising out of the pool like dinosaur bones. Above, a golden moon in a starless mass and a hot black wind rustling through the mango trees. Below, the pool lights made the depths glow in electric blue. The little boy let his fingers sink and light up, going bright white, so that they hardly looked like his own.

On the roof of the mansion opposite was a woman, her dress made of a skull, the teeth elongated to form her skirt and her breasts pressed up against the forehead bone. Her arms rose like wings and she seemed in need of saving, but the grin she wore was one of a huckster and you knew you couldn’t be sure. She was playing with birds, leaping up to catch them and twirling her hips.

Her dancing had the peculiar skill of the ballerina – hovering in mid air, effortlessly in defiance of gravity. The boy watched her from the pool until in the light of the moon the lines of her wavered and fragmented into cubic spaces and she was a Picasso, a dash of yellow, a dash of black against the starless sky.

Below her on the steps to the front door of the mansion stood a businessman in a top hat with his back turned to the boy. He was staring into the crowded lounge. The ornate Arabian door next to him had a perfect cutout of his form that he could have gone through, and from it stared the revelers in the lounge, in hostility or amusement the boy could not tell.

The boy in the pool with his four black fingers was trying to piece time together as an optical illusion. Great battleships had been sent out into the horizon and hands had sketched hands and those hands had sketched hands upon paper and we’d come no closer to perceiving it. The world rippled outwards, panoramic, abundant, mythical.

What had come and what would be, what was now and what could be? What had happened and what should come next, what would become of us, should we jest? It was all a portrait upon the boy’s mind, a sliver of joy to pass the time, rhythm and verse to please the sky, a fearless courage to do or die.

The boy walked out of the pool up the steps and past the businessman with the bowlers hat, into the mansion with the revelers who drank and mused. A small bird twittered in from the garden and landed on his shoulder. His four fingers reached up to clutch it, but when he grabbed it wasn’t there. Outside, the hot black wind blew through the mango trees.

He entered alone and unafraid.