The Beret Boy

The boy in front of you wears the brightest pair of owlish eyes. The quiver on his lower lip doesn't stop and his cheeks are pale with cold. His fingernails are sliced with fresh biting marks, the tension in his shoulders and the crease on his forehead laced with anxiety. The stammers falling from his red lips are remnants of a shipwreck washing ashore. His short screams (that only you can hear) are teeming with the melodrama of a violin, and the dust under his lids can't be blinked away. The corners of his mouth's gruesome shape—of hopelessness and the repetition and awaiting of a hundred yawns—are hurting. His eyes, as they peek around the ghostly room, are in a glinting sheen that reflects that rather sad blinking of a neon sword. His stomach grumbles and everyone else's eyes are indignant and judgmental as they turn to his crinkling forehead and his trembling pillars of legs that have been strictly instructed to stand straight. He closes his owlish eyes for one second, feeling embarrassment tickling up his pale throat, and he's still and he's just a small boy.

You hand him your coat. He peers up at you—a shy, curious inquiry swaying in his young shoulders—so instead of dropping the furry coat in the bowl of his uncurled hands, you spare a prompt sway yourself and carefully hover the coat over his shoulders and draw them there. He drops his hands and gives a half-flinch before you do, and after you set the coat he peers up at you more. A small 'o' shapes itself on his lips, and it's a change, like a mumble in a nap, like iridescent colors on a banally dull sketchbook page. You think you feel a barely there 'Hallelujah.' His nose then begins to color itself a cherry, and his lips set into a crumby line again, but his eyes blink more than usual and he shifts his feet across the stony space he's let himself have. Good.

Then people in the same room are murmuring—it's a clucking of a tongue, it's a nightmarish scream-whisper, it's a code, another language maybe. Your shirt is poor, ragged and sleeveless, and you bet the temperature is tumbling down deathly. You touch the wall with a breath, then a palm, and even the room feels glacial and feeble, but it is never bendable and always impenetrable. You shiver and you almost hiss because you mustn't shiver that great. You bow your head—your beret almost tips out of place on your speeding head—and it's hopeless! This place is ridden with wisps of nightmares. Gruesome. Dirty. Tight. Nothing here is palatable. Your spirits plummet, you can feel them.

These are your first few months, and already you've been kicked into the grayest jail like a rat. Every elder looks up only to receive food and water. When they do, you see vestiges of childish hope kissed on their coal-smeared features. You really try not to remember their faces. They work voraciously for anything edible, to quench their thirst, to kidnap their hunger. Their lips are stick-thin and their malnourished bones jut at every joint. Their fingers are nimble and experienced, picking at the crevices of the walls and the gaps between their teeth. You've tried to speak. They had replied with either grouchy silence or churlish monosyllables, so you attempt no more. Any utterance of any kind is hushed to the lowest volume, because everyone is afraid of the shadows and their henchmen.

The boy is sleeping. (You find this to be true because his head lulls down softly and his shoulders aren't too tense anymore.) He's almost got it this time—dozing off ramrod straight, just hanging there—but he fails and you barely catch him in the space you have. His appointments with sleep are scarce. It shouldn't be like that, with any child, really. He shudders awake, dimples that are rare and that aren't so traceable showing up in a hazy 'mmm.' He's alert soon enough. You don't lay a hand on him once again, but in his weary eyes you see hope he doesn't know how to feel.

It's funny, how the young—troubled or safe—can fill you with hills and hills of saving hope and wisdom.

'& every breath we drew was Hallelujah.'