When the Levee Breaks

This scene is set in black and white. It is not darkened unnecessarily, nor are there the shadows and clouds of a storybook forbodance. Instead the day is bright and the lining, crisp, a scene accented only by the stray strands of sunlight filtering through a rustle of leaves. The outstretched fingertips of an early winter comb through the treetops as a slender boy no older than 15 makes his way across the forest floor.

He resembles a character from a Tim Burton movie I knew as a child, a solid colored sweater shrouding his pale, slender body, a gait so rigid it could have been stopmotion. You can hear him mumbling to himself, in the same anxious tones one would expect from a frightened animal. You can also hear the scraping of the old school desk being drug behind him, ripping through leaves and scratching the same shallow cuts into the surface of the earth as the stray branches scrape onto his pale, boyish wrists.

But if you turn your ear toward the valley, dimming in your mind the sounds of the boy, you'd hear the most important sound of all, the sound of an alarm. At this point it is safe to assume the residents of the nearby mountain town (from which the alarms toll) are in full panic. Mothers are clutching their crying children, men are grappling for supplies, and elderly couples lock hands and kneel by their marriage bed in prayer, deciding it best to die together. There is no chance of survival, even if most of the roads out of town weren't washed away by yesterday's storm. Still, most of the town will try to flee - some on foot.

In this way people are predictable, which is why we return again to the boy - to the only one not thinking about death. It is not that he didn't hear the alarm, though he was loitering at the old school house on the outskirt of town. In fact thinking about death had become a sort of routine for the boy, and that's why when the heralds signaled him his fate, his thoughts turned to life instead. More specifically: his life of regret.

It only took him a few seconds to reach acceptance, even with the tinge of guilt as he realized he had prayed for this. Repeatedly. He started with the "wish I could have"s, woken from each tangent with a clank of the metal desk legs against the knuckled root, only to drift into another as he imagines the things he could have done, remembers the women he could have loved, if he weren't "so fucking pathetic." In fact, he didn't stop muttering till he reached the "wish I didn't"s, weighted words fading to weighted steps.

He was still like that when he reached it, the becomer of death. He was amazed how giant it seemed up close, scraping the floors of the clouds funneled between the ridges, even though he passed it every day into town. He glanced toward the distant edges where concrete cuts into stone and remembered for a second a story he was told, a german boy who spotted a leak in the dam above town and plugged it with his finger. Apparently he stood there for hours, resolute on saving the town, even plugging a few more leaks. But it's hard for him to think of saving others when he knows he can't save himself, so he gives up the fable and stumbles blindly forward toward glaring memories.

He parked the desk on the stony bank of the nearby stream and took a seat in the plastic chair whose back had been kicked through - leather shoe tapping a metal leg, scratching his initials to the hinged platform with his raw and bloodied fingers. Truth is he wanted a front row view, and now that he's spotted the first of the spurts of water that have forced cracks into concrete, he thought of how the cat of the "hag" next door bled when he cut it.

He meant to kill it, to slit her from face to tail, and in killing it he succeeded, yet not with the clean cut from his father's rusty box cutter he'd expected. Instead he only nicked it's neck before it broke free of him, spurting small fountains of frothy blood as it died running. He had to burn his clothes, knowing those to be stains water could never wash away.

He could have tried to stop that leak as well, to grab the neck tight and run towards the vet's place, but he only stared -- because of that he knew no one would be saving them, that there is no force of good and fairness. After that he knew there'd be no redemption, no heaven, only a cage befitting the monster he seemed cursed to grow into.

A low groan drowned the mountains in silence, like the earth was shifting to adjust under the passing weight of God's footstep. The last we hear of the boy are labored breaths and a slight sniffle. He's weeping now, face down, arms folded over his head like the guessing game from childhood. No one ever picked him, and now he knew no one ever would.