Yellow Boy

By Justine Assad

Crispin wakes up one morning, stinking, not knowing why or what is causing it. His masked parents take him to a strange place to see a strange man. Through shadows and darkness, the man's methods are unusual and bizarre. Will he be able to give Crispin - and his parents - the answers and solutions they are so desperate for?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Justine Assad
• Release date: Apr 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301875696

Book preview

Yellow Boy

by

Justine Assad

Published by Justine Assad at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Justine Assad

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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of this author

***

.I.

It was a curious odor.

He lay still in his bed, breathing, thinking, feeling the day around him burn on the other side of his window. The sun was warm outside the still-closed bedroom curtains; it was ten forty-five on a March Thursday on a quiet street in a quiet neighbourhood. The house outside stood ordinary in front of its garden greens and quickly fading summer trees; white and green ivy hugged and climbed up the front side of pale coffee walls, vagrant limbs crept in through the window of the dark-curtained room on the top floor. Up there and outside nothing could be heard, sounds were lost in thin bright air; on the inside of the unlit musty room, voices from downstairs were lifted and carried through the dubious walls; on the small single bed that rested between the door and the window, he lay listening to the noise beneath him, oddly tired and lamenting. Although he’d been awake for only a few minutes, he was already delicately aware of himself and his thoughts, of the people whose house he invaded and whom he now heard below working away at their weekday lives. He was on his back, sucking in the peculiar smelling air through his flaring nostrils; he struggled to identify what it was, yet he was certain it was coming from his room; it seemed to be quite near, nonmoving.

He shifted himself, craning his head to see the time; it read ten fifty-eight; he flopped back down with a moan; he knew he would have to rise soon, and face another day. It was a fact he cared very little for, it frightened him; the thoughts of it frightened him even more. He hated his thoughts; he hated thinking and self-awareness, the responsibility that came with being cognizant of the self; he hated the self, it was useless and worthless – it was nothing. He shut his eyes hard, in an ongoing, futile attempt to lose his mind, to chase it away for a second so he could be alone and mindless; a head filled with nothing but a hum; an ineffectual space, sat atop an ineffectual being, not living, not dead, merely something that is, because it can be.

He sighed at himself, in disgust, in regret, and concentrated on the booming voice which woke him; the words were indistinct, but the inflections changed, the tempo; it never seemed to stop – not once – just a continuous flow of words saying absolutely nothing at all, as if silence were the greatest sin. Crispin reluctantly lifted himself from his bed, opened the bedroom door as softly as it were possible for him to do so, and made the short little journey to the bathroom. He noticed that the smell followed him as he moved; suspending, confusing. He pulled off his pants, he pulled off his shirt; he took a shower in the muted light of the morning; slow breathing and calm, the hard warm water splintering on his skin, the slippery tiles, down into the abyss of the metallic plastic hole in the floor; he stood for a bit with the water spitting down onto his neck, watching it run down his naked body then swallowed by the black hole between his feet. He turned the water off, and stepped out of the shower, feet warm on cool sticky carpet; blackened and moldy from years of wet warm feet trampling on the same one spot, over and over. Daylight squeaked in through the solitary frosted glass window, reflecting off the pale blue tiles of the perspiring bathroom. It was warm inside, humid. Crispin dried himself off, got dressed and walked back to his unkempt little room; he pulled his bed straight, opened then reclosed the dust-smelling curtains and walked out, shutting the door behind him. He stood silently in the narrow hallway, listening to neverending chatter of the woman.

The smell was still there.

The stairs squeaked and moaned as he descended them. He could hear the two in the kitchen at a late breakfast table; his mother’s large, boisterous voice, his father’s hostile grunts and sighs in automated, thoughtless answer.

His parents married twenty-nine years ago – a year before he was born. She was the baby sister of the preacherman, nineteen and overflowing with curious self-assurance; he was the son of the local pig farmer – six years her senior – standoffish and insolent. It was a match made in heaven. They met one summer-infested night at the church’s annual bonfire; her brazen impetuousness and strident manner appealed to the sullen, arrogant young man. The attraction was one of contradictions, of one always trying to outdo and defeat the other. Love – or the distinct lack thereof – didn’t at all matter when the prize on offer was an imagined sense of superiority; they were both aware of it, they both were capricious, and incited by it. They were married after a swift, intense courtship; her brother performed the ceremony in an empty church hall one late autumn evening, through very tightly clenched, cynical teeth. After a year of one adjusting to the other, and settling into the shared boredom of matrimony: they had their only son. A happy occasion it was not, it was just another aspect of the union; the expectation of creating a family. And so it set the long, uninspiring course of their lives into motion; joyless and obligated; they remained together out of their commitment to mutual antipathy, to unhappiness.

Father got a job as a bus driver in the nearby town; in his surly bombastic manner he would flirt with unfortunate women eager to get to their destinations, eager to return - none took notice; those that did, did so disparagingly, unseen words