The Little Boy Afraid of His Shadow

A good night tale made for a black and white screen that transcends to the mind instead.

 

Once upon a time,

in a a land not quite like our own though no one could tell the difference, the grass grew high like the tides on a beach's desolate shore. From this sea rose a simple house in which lived a little boy and his mother. He was young and she was old and they spent many days bathed in each other's presence and in an immense silence. The days were happy and the days ever long. There was not a thing to disturb them, not even the wind, which blew the wave of grass without out ever being there. However, the little boy lived in great fear and bound himself to the unpenetrated darkness of their little hut and all his days he spent at the window, watching his mother garden, the heavens that never met the night, and the endless sea of grass.

 

Oh, how he did wish to leave the hut, to kneel with her in the soil amongst the small sprout,

to lose himself within the labyrinth of grass, to gaze into the heavens wide-eyed and with the broken delusions of being able to touch a cloud. But no, he did not, he merely stood at the window sill as if he were stone, a gay smile spread gently across his parched lips as his cheeks hollowed and his eyes sunk. A living stone who withered from a desire never met.

 

He was old (or maybe he just seemed old) on the day he left the window, in a step full of

unhuman grace, the serene smile a gorey wound on his ugly face, as he stepped from the house and into the sunlight. He stood there, in that dazzling light, and yielded his body to the vision of his mother, and she saw him to be both hideous and beautiful, so torn apart by his silence and unspoken want, beautiful in his sudden animation, and she knew she was his and that he was hers and that she loved him immensely. It was this love that drew her blind eyes back to the garden and her claws dug once more into that gentle dirt.

 

His eyes saw her not at all, was instaed consumed in an instant by the pool of dark that the

sun cast before him and within his eyes on this dial he walked forward, into the tides of the grass he had spent his life watching his frame taken in and devoured. And it was here, in the majesty of the life he had lived, finally free of the house he had bound himself to by fear, he was consumed in an instant, his shadow, his greatest enemy, striking him down so that he was nothing and he laid for a moment in the field of grass, body limp like a rag doll; finally free of the stand it had held for an eternity, and his eyes dimmed in the light of the heavens, though he saw only his shadow, and he breathed of its beauty and its worth, to die here, free, rather than live forever in fear...

Author's Note

So I'm reading the Fountainhead. And that inspired this. And it's kind of funny, if you think about it.

Reviews

[Hedra Helix]

wow this is beautiful, short but whole and true to its style the entire way through. good s**t, your work is really inspiring!

[__Flaw__]

Hmm, i thought it was a bit dark. The way u wrote made me stutter and cling onto ur words like a blind folded dummy. Have u ever tried something horriffic ??? :)))
Anways, this was a great effort... Adios. :))