boy

*based on Rick Moody's "Boys"

The boy, who is no longer a boy, enters the house.  The boy, who is a boy in heart and mind and no longer his body, enters the house slowly.  The boy shuffles, takes it slowly, one step at a time, in his mind still a boy but his body forcing him to spend two minutes on each step.  The boy grips the handles of his walker, as he may have once gripped the handle bars of a bicycle.  The boy inches his walker forward, takes it slowly, one step at a time.  The boy’s hands, having once had such a firm grip on baseball bats and rocks for skipping and fishing poles, now shake and make it impossible to get the key in the lock on the first try.  The boy drops his keys and bends down to pick them up.  The boy feels pains in his body that he never would have felt as a boy; not of scraped knees and bee stings but the pains of a body that will soon shut down.  The boy finally gets the key through and enters the house.  The boy sees the girl and remembers what she looked like when she had still been a girl.  The boy gives the girl a quick peck on the cheek that he never would have given her as a boy.  The boy remembers then all of the girls, and all of the pecks that he had given them everywhere but on the cheek.  The boy remembers the way girls felt, without wrinkled skin and without hands that shake.  The boy sits down to dinner, which is no longer a brief respite between being a cowboy and an astronaut but is now a long rest between the arduous walks to and from the dinner table.  The boy chews his food with teeth that are no longer his own, brings fork to mouth with hands that shake.  The boy watches Wheel of Fortune and tries desperately to make sense of it, remembering the black and white scenes that used to flash across the screen in front of him as he sat cross legged on the floor or upside down on the couch and not stiffly in a chair that’s too small and too cold in a kitchen that’s too small and too cold with a girl that’s just too cold.  The boy eats his low sodium, low sugar, low calorie food and thinks he can remember eating hot dogs and ice cream and candy and potato chips.  The boy, who is no longer a boy, begins to contemplate the journey up the stairs.  Once taking them two, three at a time, the boy now takes each step two or three minutes at a time.  The boy lowers himself into the bathtub, with arms that used to swing from ropes and legs that used to kick, kick, kick hard through lakes and pools.  The boy remembers diving, jumping, swimming, spinning, flipping through the water.  The boy remembers wanting to be in the Navy, or a cop, or a cowboy, or an astronaut.  The boy is not any of those things, not now or ever, except in his mind.  The boy is now only a boy in his mind.  The boy lays down in bed next to his girl that had once been a girl and is a girl no longer.  The boy remembers being in bed with girls, not sleeping.  The boy wonders how many, or how few, times more he will enter the house.
               

Author's Note

This was an assignment for a Creative Writing class. We had to copy, exactly, Rick Moody's narrative style in "Boys." While I take issue with having no creative freedom in a Creative Writing class, I thought this came out pretty good.