Captive audience

He sat, utterly lost on his bedsheets in a room that was just beginning to acquire the distinct hint of mold. The floorboards creaked with age and his bedroom window shuddered in its frame with each roar of thunder and the pounding of his mother's heels somewhere below. The boy kept himself occupied with his story. Down there, there was noise. Up here, there was silence but for him. Each turn of a page was a crisp, shrill call to the fact that he was in a bad place, but the best he could do for himself was distraction.

Characters contained in his hands played out their roles in a world that teased him. It was an adventure he could imagine for himself, even if he didn't amount to much in real terms. But the intrepid hero he wished he could be was beyond such grounded, realistic constraints as poverty, ugliness or stupidity. If there weren't such things as money or smog or houses he might have had a better chance. Maybe it would've made sense to sling his comic books and some fruit snacks over his shoulder, grab his three-inch pocket knife and head out into the unknown, if only he lived like shit to begin with. But he didn't quite live like shit. He lived like mold. Feeding off this place, stagnant, pungent, but slowly getting bigger and older until it gave and fell apart. He needed it. This house was dead, its occupants the purveyors of its decay, feeding on its carcass until it would finally heave one last sigh of resignation and collapse beneath his feet.

All that remained for him now was the story. With it came baggage, a growing dread that he was getting older and that it was time to accept he wasn't the child he was in years past, nor a few hours ago when it finally became clear that he didn't belong anymore.

The book was some kind of consolation prize for not being what they wanted. Always, they had hidden their true feelings from him and taken to each other for their release. Always, he could see it in their eyes just the same. He didn't work hard enough, didn't read the right books long enough, didn't care enough. Maybe they were right. He tried, though. He knew they knew that, or they wouldn't be so afraid of telling him so.

That was what made it unbearable, knowing they couldn't be what they wanted for him, either. What they couldn't say to him, he could hear for himself with an ear to their door, their vicarious affectations pointed and vicious, but inevitably missing their target. Of course his failure was their fault, as if they were a crumbling business and he was their empty parking lot. It was their delusion, but unfortunately not his own.

So he remained there, transfixed, for better or for worse, by the token of his failure. It lay open in his trembling hands as he allowed the words to replace the ever-looming fear of reprisal in his mind. Mercifully, despite the turmoil he managed to settle himself.

His soul sank into the pages and he held his life, all its failures and all its promise in his fingers. The walls shook in his hands, his eyes enraptured by feeble, tenuous, yet encompassing words. All about him dinned the thunderous applause of raindrops on vinyl siding and glass, and footsteps and shouting from through so many hollow wooden doors.

As he lived his fantasy in the world laid out in ink, the story implanted within him a desire. Damn the smog and the house and the people in it and the smog in them. With the turn of a page, a battle ended. The hero carried his wounded friend to safety and while they died, he spoke softly and comforted them. The hope crept into the boy's mind that his only problem was complacency. With another page, his idol left the body, now alone, and finally reached the summit of his mountain. He set up camp for the night. With one more, the boy glanced up to the window to find the sun waning on the horizon. As the intrepid hero laid himself down in a bedroll, his admirer decided against his mother's warnings not to listen to his father when he'd drunk too much, and take some of his advice. Finally, that night, he would get lost.