Copyright © 2013 by Travis McBee
All rights reserved.
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.
Disclaimer: The persons, places, things, and otherwise animate or inanimate objects mentioned in this novel are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to anything or anyone living (or dead) is unintentional.
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The Boy Who Melted
By Travis McBee
Rain. Always rain. It fell around me, destroying the peace of the afternoon; turning the pavement black; keeping me inside. Insidious rain: my jailer; my executioner.
I was three months old when my parents discovered my abnormality. They had taken me to my grandparents’ house to meet the extended family. Everything had gone well at first; the people doted on me, the new little baby. Nobody paid much attention to the clouds gathering like wolves on the horizon. To them rain was simply rain. To me, as everyone would soon learn, it was death.
By the time my parents decided that it was time to make our departure, the first fat drops of rain were falling upon the hood of our little station wagon. My mother whisked me outside in my little car seat, swinging the handle gently in the rocking fashion I seemed to enjoy. The car sat less than ten feet from the door of the house, but it was too far.
As we made the short trip, a drop of rain fell upon my face. A lucky shot, seeing as the little circle of my face was the only part of me not covered by thick clothing, but if luck was involved that day—or in my life in general—it was of the bad variety.
I began to cry at once. I wailed and threw my tiny limbs around with as much force as I could muster, but my mother paid little attention. Her lack of concern would be my own fault, for I was one of those horrible babies that screamed more than slept, and because of my love of screaming, my mother was conditioned to mumble a few baby words to me, screw a pacifier into my mouth, and leave me to my own devices. It was the action she took that horrible, rainy day, and my torture began.
Rain plastered the windshield as we drove through the winding back roads. The rain was a torrent now, blistering the road. The wheels kicked up sheets of water which hummed on the wheel wells. Like all children, I was relegated to the back seat where my car seat was turned around, giving me a wonderfully boring view of the stained cloth upholstery. The roar of the rain, windshield wipers, and cars rushing past in the other lane was loud, but my screams drowned them all. My little body rocked around in the tight straps, and my voice split the air with the persistent, piercing cries of a baby.
As I said, I was a bad baby. Screaming was the norm for me. I screamed when I wanted a bottle. I screamed when I wanted a new diaper. I screamed when I wanted the little airplanes above my crib turned on, and I screamed when I wanted them turned off. Everyone learns to ignore what is always happening. People do not stop to be amazed at the constants in life: that they are breathing or that their feet somehow manage to move them along without concentration. My mother learned not to become too concerned when I wailed. For that, I take responsibility, but I cannot—although I’ve tried—absolve her or my father of their actions that day.
The ride from my grandmother’s house to our own took an hour and a half. To my parent’s dismay, I managed to scream the entire way. They thought, of course, that what troubled me was simply the loud noise of the driving rain or an empty stomach. How were they to know that the single drop of rain was torturing me with all of the effectiveness of thumbscrews? How were they to know that, for once, I genuinely needed their attention?
The rain had abated by the time our little car finally pulled into the driveway. My father, having been tortured by the rain in his own way, ran into the house to relive himself, leaving my mother to discover the monstrosity that had once been her son.
She swung open the backdoor and reached in to snap open the little belt which held me in place. She never got that belt off, because at that moment, she caught sight of my face, and her screams joined my own.
My face. Oh, my awful face. It had been the little chubby excuse of adorableness a few hours before, my cheeks cherry red and puffy, my eyes glittering wickedly. But now, now, a red welt that stretched from my forehead to the tip of my nose obscured those features, decimating what had once been cute. That welt swelled and pulsed, a white piece of cruelty surrounded by angry red. At the center of that cataclysm was what forced my mother away from me—even when her maternal instinct told her to scoop me up and heal me by sheer force of will. They tried to describe it to me later, but the doctor’s photographs spoke more clearly than anything they could have uttered. Rotten. The center of that angry sore was rotten, rotting, and rotted. The flesh had turned black and a hole sank deep into my face, deep enough that the doctor could later insert his cleansing swab a full half inch. That part of me had died and decomposed within the short, agonizingly long, car ride. It was my simple misfortune that the drop of rainwater struck just over my right eye. The infection that spread took that eye, half of my nose, and the upper part of my lip—how I managed to keep screaming, they did not know.
My mother, to her credit, recovered quickly and screamed for my father. The two of them then rushed me to the hospital where I spent the next three weeks perplexing doctors. They could not figure out what had so disfigured me. Some of them proposed a virulent strain of leprosy. Others suggested a violent allergy. Still others accused my parents of pouring acid on me.
I became a case study. They sent me to a specialist in Atlanta who then sent me to New York. It didn’t make any difference; none of them could discern what had really happened.
After almost a year of constant experiments, they repaired my face as best they could. I would never see out of my right eye again and they could never fix the deep, sunken pit that was now my face. They sent me home.
What accidently happened to me was horrible; what my parents allowed to happen was even worse. Word spread of my condition, as is expected, and soon the vultures of misery descended. Talk shows, hosted by doctors who pretend to care about something other than ratings contacted my parents. The producers of those shows offered money, extravagant amounts of it, and my parents were unable to resist. I became a freak show. Oh, sure, the people who tuned in thought that they actually cared about my situation, that by watching the show they helped understand what had happened to me, but what they really saw was a little boy who had had half of his face melted off. Those people are no different from the circus goers of a bygone age who gaped at the bearded ladies and conjoined twins. They don’t care; they simply delight in the misery of others, covering their guilt with feigned concern.
I made the rounds of these shows, news programs, and scientific symposiums. My parents grew rich. I grew famous. A famous monster. Isn’t that nice? Move over Frankenstein, John Woodward is in the house.
Like all things popular, the interest in me faded over time. My parents moved to a new, spacious house in an upscale district where they rewarded me for my suffering with a larger bedroom and a playroom full of toys. I was still of interest to the medical world, and thus spent a large portion of my first three years of life inside of hospitals. Through some kind of luck, I managed to avoid the rain for those three years, but it was only a matter of time until it caught me again.
It was an overcast day when it happened. I had toddled outside onto the manicured lawn which I had paid for. My father was out there as well, watching over me as he sipped at a beer and read a newspaper.
I had assembled a nice little village in my sandbox. A castle, nothing more than a mound of sand with a few, bucket shaped towers, stood in the center of toy dump
trucks, fire trucks, and airplanes. I was in the process of smoothing out a runway for my burgeoning airport when the rain came.
Unlike the fat drops that had disfigured my face, this rain was a gentle, cooling mist. The moisture alighted on my skin like a fine sheen of sweat, and the pain erupted.
I had known pain like it before. There is no doubt that the pain I suffered while that single fat drop had destroyed my tiny face had been excruciating, yet because of my age, I had somehow forgotten that agony. It would not be the case for the force that ransacked my existence when that mist covered my body.
Fire. That is the best I can do. Fire