Another short chapter up.

Dandelion Clocks
- Wave 2 -

I wasn’t born like this at all. In fact I was the most cheerful, most adorable little boy you’d ever seen. But one girl made sure all that changed. One.

She was in my kindergarten class, and she had this bombastic head of brown hair, which bobbed whenever she showed off whatever she knew about the many facts of life. And a bloody fool I was to have believed every word of hers back then.

Because she was the one who told me that children could be blown up all the way into the sky on windy days and disappear forever.

“And girls only reach the clouds and float back down, because girls are good,” she reasoned eloquently, her bright blue eyes wide with truth, her freckles popping with sincerity. “Boys are naughty and they run around and their mummies cannot hold their hands. That’s why they go up and up and nobody can see them anymore and they don’t come back.”

She was the one who sent me quivering and crying and refusing to leave the classroom when my mother came to fetch me in the afternoon.

That was Day One.

Days Two to Four Thousand and Five Hundred were spent constantly sprinting to shelter, and retaliating in the following path of evolution: Screaming, Crying, Groaning in Fear, Gasping, and Flinching. All because no kid in the neighbourhood would give up any chance of taunting someone into clockwork misery. Someone who cowered at any single connotation of the word wind.

The legend of the Pied Piper was nothing when I knew that Zephyrus and friends could whisk children away with such unrelenting ease.

And for that not to happen, I had to be very well-behaved. I neither ran by myself across the roads, nor got into fights with other kids. And the only things I dared to ask for were such peripherals as finger gloves and aviation goggles for my birthdays. My neighbours, knowingly, gave me a fishbowl on my tenth.

I chose to keep goldfish in it.

I tried to take them to the vet once when they were sick, but ended up killing them instead. A cold draught hit me from the back while I was making my way there, and I smashed the glass onto the pavement. The fish all flopped into the gutter.

I ran home wailing that the wind turned me into Medusa. I cried because the gust had felt so horrifyingly evil in my hair. I forgot all about my goldfish right there and then.

- - -

At some point I finally stopped believing that bad people — or anyone, for that matter — would glide away with the wind, but the fear was so deeply rooted inside me that it was impossible to unearth.

And I will remember who it was that started it all — her, that girl who ruined my life, that girl whose first name was the only thing I knew about her: Tess.

When I meet you again, Tess, I swore inside my head, you shall know no peace. Ever.

Until very recently, she was an etch in my mind, one which I would try to complete with random faces, and order to be put down in a variety of torture sessions. One particular procedure involved goldfish jaws clamping all along her arms and toes.

Girls who make people kill their pets are infinitesimally worse than naughty boys, I would tell her. Then I would send that mental facsimile of her down a gloriously spiked gutter, through the cirrus clouds and a freefall of twenty-three thousand feet.

That sequence still has a pretty, golden folder in the archive of my mind.

- - -

Now, I still shivered and squeaked at the slightest breeze. I mean — it is the worst thing that can ever exist on this planet! This moving current of molecules and dust and pure wickedness absorbed from everything it’s ever gone through, oozing deep into the pores on your face and up your sleeves and pant legs and past every single hair follicle — invading you and groping you and laughing at you just because you can’t see them!

(Imagine being raped by the ghosts of murmuring box jellyfish. That’s what it always felt like.)

-tbc-