"I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language.  To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization."

-Frantz Fannon 

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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The Boy Who Could Levitate

Francis hovered quietly over his bed.  Thoughts spilled from his head, ears, eyes, and chest - the room a messy canvas for his musing.  He watched the drama unfold - his drama.  The holograms were all him, conversing, fighting, fading, and perishing into a sun spot on the floor.  

"Meow?"  Gunther tried to catch the shoe lace of Hubert.  He failed, not realizing that Hubert wasn't real, and his shoelace was a stringed illusion.  Gunther tried to brush up against Madam Olaf's suede boots.  She was standing near the hat rack.  Many hats fell to the floor about Gunther, and he ran away surprised at himself.  

"You're so stupid Gunther!"  Francis eradicated all his characters.  In truth he was bored with them all.  Hubert and Madam Olaf had fallen into one dimensional characterizations of themselves.  They dissipated.  

And now a light show for Gunther to chase. Francis drew a spectacle across the room. It streamed from his eyes -- an iridescent  tangle of lazar beams.  Soon Elena came running from under the bed.  Her feline face jerked from corner to corner.  She emerged into the center of the room with characteristic trepidation and inquisitiveness.  How cats love their own imaginations!  But Elena and Gunther loved Francis' imagination even more because it owned theirs. 

Francis grew bored.  He dropped the light show, and tumbled to his bed in a thud.  His mind was weary now.  Gunther and Elena gazed at the still world through the front window.  They found nothing odd about the insane sameness outside.  Francis huffed at them both.  

"Go outside you stupid cats!"  He threw a football at Gunther.  They scattered instantly.  

Francis heard his mother enter the front door. Clanging dishes and an addled voice accompanied her. Katherine rumbled through the house like an open nerve.   A familiar feeling of disgust consumed him. Francis was opaque to his silly, mismanaged mother. 

Her consciousness is dim, he thought.  She is a specimen of herself. 

"Childhood of Luvers" reached out to Francis, asking to be read.  The homing device was blinking, asking, beseeching.  He bent to its will. 

Another Grand Escape, thought Francis.  He rolled his eyes and picked up the book, colors streaming from its weathered pages.  

Katherine's incessant clanging stopped.  

And as he read the characters introduced themselves to him, one by one.  Zhenya came first.  She discovered gardens throughout the room.  She got into a holographic train and watched a world go by.  She stretched and fumbled in her innocence.  Francis watched her and read... read and watched.  He couldn't help but to love Zhenya.  Her sweetness was a potion.  Francis' small eyes glistened.  A crystaline tear crept down his slender cheek. That stare he gave her!  It was intensified by a peculiar darkness which began in defiance and ended in a slow, curling grimace.  

"Zhenya you are beautiful!  I will have you!"  She didn't listen.  The best version of Zhenya was oblivious to his demands.  Francis toiled to forget, but he couldn't extinguish her like Madam Olaf and Hubert.  She wouldn't dissipate!  

"OUT!"  Francis screamed and held his ears.  He threw his blankets, trying to cover her.  He rummaged for more things to throw.  Francis tried to envision a maelstrom to consume the stupid girl.  A hundred books were strewn across the floor now, and papers, and petty change and records and everything throwable, but Zhenya stayed in her blithe ignorance.