The Great Pretender

He was a great pretender.  When he was younger, he'd get down on his hands and knees on the stained blue carpet and bark at the family cocker spaniel.  She wasn't the brightest dog to begin with, but when he threatened her like this, her glass button eyes would turn into storm clouds and she would bare her shiny white teeth.  She once bit him, on Christmas Day, and there had been a family feud over whether or not to put the dog down.  It ended up being his choice and he decided that she was not ready for the floor, not yet.  The scar on his face was bad at first and everyone looked at him with sorrow in their eyes.

His mother screamed when she saw what happened.  He remembered wondering if she was going to be mad that there was blood on the carpet and on his new polo shirt that he had unwrapped only a few hours earlier.  She always had treated the objects that had been bought as precious family heirlooms.  Everything must be preserved, from the dirtiest sock to the expensive oil painting that hung, mismatched, above the purple leather couch in the den.  He never understood her insistence but it was accepted nonetheless as a necessary sanction to be imposed on the household.  She was not mean about it; she was honestly and constantly concerned about the state of things at all points in time.  

As the blood ran down his face and onto the turquoise collar, he imagined himself in the cold basement with all of his Christmas presents, alone and free of his terrible predicament.  When he unwrapped the shirt that morning, he deconstructed the package with a very certain method; quickly, with feigned excitement, but careful, always so careful to keep the large pieces of paper totally intact, so that the volume of the wrapping paper pile could reach it's maximum potential.  He was not interested so much in the actual things that he received for the most part.  The pile of paper interested him, this physical by-product of a happy Christmas morning, a way to measure contentment with waste and trash.  When the pile became bigger than him, he burrowed into the center while his family watched, so much crinkling and crackling, like all the presents in the world being opened at once.  Once inside, he laid down and closed his eyes, and started to chew on a section of Santa-printed paper.  It tasted like mildew and polymer, sort of like the basement smelled, and he wondered if it was changing the color of his tongue.

Eight hours later, people were yelling a lot and saying things like "hospital" and "hurry" and "bitch."  There were more stains on the blue carpet now, brownish stains that dripped from his own slight frame.  He stared at the grandfather clock, and felt no pain.  It didn't move anymore, the clock, just a piece of adornment for the household, another thing that had some strange lost value.  Where did the time go when the clock didn't work anymore?  Everyone was moving around him so quickly, and he wondered if maybe he was experiencing the lost time of the grandfather clock, since people were moving so fast, but he felt so very slow.  Someone locked the dog in the closet; another person yelled about getting blood and paw prints on cashmere coats and hand-knit scarves.  The hands on the clock didn't move but they were certainly redeemed by the hands touching his own face.  He felt hands under his skin, it was wet and warm and felt good in a horrible way.

The scar was long and hideous, when his face healed months later, but it wasn't so bad.  He couldn't see it most of the time at least, except in the mornings before school when he'd gel his short hair in front of his parents mirror.  He kept the turquoise polo shirt, for some reason, and left it hanging in his closet for years, like some forgotten friend.  It looked like it had been decimated by a bowl of chocolate ice cream, not blood.  He didn't keep the shirt for his mother's sake.  It was for him, so that he could remember how easily a brand-new shirt could be ruined, in just a split-second, and how time marches on despite stained shirts and scarred faces, and how those stained shirts and those scars would always be his, even after the shirt left his sticky white chest.  His shirts.  His scars.  Not hers.