The Unfeasible Series

the desire: excerpt two

The sunrise was vivid, though the child could only view such a masterpiece from the confines of his blankets. A dazed wind slung through the room, clouding the child’s head as the fever grasped his pale, shaking frame. Skin and bones were the only thing noticeable about the child at first glance. It seemed no matter how much he ate, his body would forever remain malnourished by the dreams he kept feeding on. A hero couldn’t help the sick, couldn’t save the dying form of a small boy. 

A hero’s only job entails the relocation of a bystander to the safehouse of a new location. No checkups, no hugs or pats, no true feelings come from giving a famous signature to a dying child. And yet, yellow, red, and blue force its way into the dreams of unsuspecting children. The figurines that hang from a shelf collect dust as nothing makes the child happier than the illusion of being saved. A disease of the body flows through the veins, taking full priority as opposed to attending to the collection of figurines arranged on the shelves. Such bedridden mercy is not shown to the weak of heart as the immune system fights itself as if strangling the owner through a mirror. 

The child is both saved and cursed by the dreams he is forced to partake in as the sickness forces an onward march. Such a battle of survival is not asymmetrical to a villain attack, yet also not much different either. Breathing becomes hard as little lungs fight to accept the air so dutifully waiting for them. 

By the time the sun finally sets, the child’s whistle breaths are ever prominent. Like breathing through a straw, the body strains itself to keep the figurine collector alive. And yet while the child fights to survive the wrath of his immune system, he had hardly enough energy to stay awake, much less bask in the excitement of his role model’s signature sprawled across his newest red, yellow, and blue action figure. 

Such a signature could not save his wilting soul, just as gravel cannot save a flower. Illusions force the child to be so near yet so far from reality, that the remaining kin of the family becomes increasingly worried, Soon the smell of antiseptic and candles fill the air around the mother and son duo. Scenery changes ever so quickly from the small bedroom to an even smaller patient room. 

Childhood dreams haunt the exhausted dreamer as he lays his head upon his mother’s shoulder, tightly wound up in her arms. Content at the comfort, knowing he would not fall, he nuzzled himself into the warmth of his only remaining family. They had little, but in contrast, they had enough. 

And yet the ever prominent seedling of something not being okay with her son slipped inside the cracks of her skull and took root in her brain. With only the option to spread like a virus, the fear grows. 

Her son was but a murmuring, wheezing mess, awaiting to be condemned to a diagnosis that would shake his small, small world. Looking at her frail, pasty child now, the mother’s mind separates the before from the after. What was once bubbly child who had prided himself on drinking two cups of milk a day to become such a strong hero, was now reduced to skeletal remains.