![]() ![]() He looked not before him but straight up as if my words came from beyond. “Why have they planted you there in the shade like a mushroom?” When it came my voice was still ragged from the chase. He must have heard me, but I stood and caught my breath, watching him. ![]() His hands were beautiful birds chained to his lap. But on this day he was sitting, just sitting on a house chair in the green-specked mud of the garden, with his strange, pale eyes shifting in their sockets. I would come again and find him on a little three-legged stool, milking his cow with deft hands, and again, whence he would be whittling by the wall in the sun. What’s more, he was as stately in his solitude as the townsfolk I daily spied on (blasphemers and nose-pickers all) were shrunken in theirs. Let us say this boy was still, as still as marble, and riveting for it. With their brat-threats dying in my ears I crashed later through a thicket and found in a clearing, as stark as any miracle, a gabled house with a skinny lad in its kitchen plot. Because I knew that no pack of holy pygmies would brave the wood without master or mother, I ran and ran, willing myself be an otter and the shade be water. It was the Lord’s Day, and we were idle - me with the sting of stones at my back, they shrieking like brats possessed. ![]()
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