He got big fast.
He got big so fast, that when they took him out of the cellar he was shaped like a box for a week, with his head bent down in prayer and his knees knocked together, but it wasn’t fear of God that shaped him so, it was the imprisonment, and the cruelty of the small-town folks who just wouldn’t let him out.
He remembered stomping and storming and howling in the cellar, all to no avail. He remembered tearing out the lead pipes from the ceiling (stopping the sound of the showers in the morning) and bending them all to knots at his feet. He remembered how they would throw food to him – a live rabbit, a brace of rats, or a seagull. He remembered how he would wait eagerly by the door for that moment when it would creak open for dinner, and he would open his mouth and suck greedily at the fresh air from the pantry.
Most of all, he remembered the deep stain of darkness, so bright that it had burned itself into him and coated him like tar. He felt wrapped in darkness, and even now, even now in his nightmares he would open his eyes and see nothing at all, nothing, and when he woke he woke with terrible rage in his eyes.
“Mudman,” they called him, “dirt face, Neanderthal.”
His own people had no use for names. They lived out in the night without fire, and the cedar and the starlight were their roofs, and the pine-loam their beds. Names were things humans used, to seperate themselves from the earth. His people were from the dawn-times, when everything had a name held only in silence.
But he had been locked in a cellar for eight years (as far as he could reckon).
When they took him out of the cellar they leashed him with shackles and an iron collar that made the sweetest melody he had ever heard. They took him down a winding gravel road where only crows sat in the trees to a coal mine and gave him a pick, which he used straight-away to kill the foreman by one blow to the head. The other miners came running, but he brandished his pick-axe and they scattered like sparrows, and left him alone to freedom at last in the flickering light of the kerosene-lamps.
His people had no use for names, but he’d been locked in a cellar, and a killer now too. So he made a name for himself from the anger left inside him, for it was the only thing he had left. He named himself Ishmael, orphan, exile, and out of the mines he rose as an etiolated colossus, with a bloody pick in one hand and a thirst for vengeance in the other.
Yeah, they’d later say, he got big fast, but still – he was so small inside.
“Why, I heard he don’t see the rain no more, he’s his very own limozeen now. He’s all up with the big folks these days.”
Posted by epoq 
