The Boy Who Sang to the Stars

Bobby's body stiffened involuntarily at the familiar wooden squeak on the lower step of the stairs leading up to his room. The smell of fear entered his nostrils; the pit of his stomach kneaded itself into a tight knot and the moisture emptied from his mouth. At the sound of the second squeak, tears welled up in his tightly shut eyes. He knew the routine. He could hear the slight scuff of the thick leather soles of his Uncle Lonnie's shoes on the sanded boards of the stairway. He could jump ahead in his mind to the door opening into the darkness revealing his uncle's' silhouette framed in the back light from the hall. He could sense the belt slipping off silently from Lonnie's pant loops like a snake slithering out from around the trunk of a tree, and then the familiar pop of the pant buttons and the slide of the zipper.

Bobby knew the routine as he lay quietly on his bed shaking in paralytic terror. He'd been working on his protection, building up barriers to the pain and he'd almost perfected the visions that would transport him to another place where if his uncle came up the stairs he'd be far away and safe. But the key word was almost. There was always a missing element that never quite worked, an element that would forsake him and leave him and his body to bear the pain, humiliation and abuse of the ugly man without a soul silhouetted in the door frame leading to Bobby' s secret hell.

In the past he'd tried to use the stars. He'd sit crouched on the floor, elbows leaning on the sill of his open bedroom window and stare out across the wide expanse of stars on a clear night. He'd call upon the stars in a strange voice that would involuntarily enter his body, but the hot white points of starlight seeping through the cold expanse of space would not waver from their constant positions. He knew somehow he'd need to move the stars.

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Lonnie was huge. He turned the doorknob to Bobby's room with his fleshy callused ham of a hand. The door swung open allowing the particles of light from the hall to creep in around the bulk of his lumbering mass. A breeze was sucking in through the open window moving the curtains into a set of diaphanous wings. Lonnie stepped in, as he always did and stood at the foot of Bobby's bed, waiting for his piggy eyes to adjust, just as he always did, waiting for Bobby to make a sound, the usual whimper of fear that convinced him of his absolute control.

In the humidity of the August night Lonnie wore only his pants. Rolls of fatty tissue obscenely curled across his chest and cascaded across his gut to overlap his crimped waist below the belt line. His skin, pale and ridged with fat, was a dripping candle. Bobby didn't make a sound, because Bobby had disappeared, escaped not on diaphanous wings but through them, out the window, across the moss-covered cedar shakes, down the eaves trough down spout to the water barrel. The thud of Bobby's final landing. though, reached Lonnie's ears, directing him to the window, the night sky and the woods beyond the yard. Lonnie knew he'd have to work harder to continue the ritual with Bobby. The new venue intrigued him - the open air, the darkness of the woods with its damp smells and the stars. Lonnie liked the stars. He turned from the window, shuffled down the hall and was down the stairs and through the door quicker than he'd ever run.

" What has got into Bobby, making the ritual so complicated. The little bastard won't get too far; he's too scared to go too far into the dark woods. I'll find him crying up against a tree and I'll have him in the quiet of the woods under the stars. He'll smell good outdoors away from the old pillows and pissed on sheets."

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Away from the porch light the darkness swallowed Bobby; the forest swallowed the square acre of trampled-down yard where Lonnie made his living cutting and hauling firewood, and maintaining his odd job equipment - chain saws, his post-hole digger and lawn mowers. They lived out of town far from ears to hear the screams and sobs of the night.

Lonnie had established reality. Bobby was sitting breathing rapidly and deeply behind the largest beech in the wood lot not far from the perimeter of the forest. Bobby knew Lonnie could hear him, hear his breathing and the pounding of his heart. Above him the cold black sky dazzled with the swath of the milky way.

Stay calm Bobby told himself, He pressed his back and the back of his neck and head against the rough bark of the beech.

" Maybe if I lie absolutely still Lonnie will go past me in the darkness, wander around the woods aimlessly trying to find me; maybe he'd get impatient and frustrated and finally go back and sit on the porch; maybe he'd wait there until morning and then in the daylight he'd beat me until I couldn't walk no more; maybe he'd wait and wait and I'd never come home again; I'd stay here in the woods and live beneath the stars forever; maybe I'd move the stars, just maybe."

Bobby was crying now, out of fear mingled with the remotest hopeful wish.

Lonnie's foot appeared beside the beech. Bobby heard it scrap across a root and come to rest just beside his hand. Lonnie was leaning against the tree. Bobby could smell the sweat that was probably trickling over the rolls of fat. Controlled breathing was the answer to concealment. Bobby heard the drumming in his chest, a drumming that could wake up the heavens, a thumping that could arouse the dead. He heard his breath, short and rhythmical, oscillating into a tell-tale scream. The scream didn't come but the uncontrolled trickle of urine filled his pants and signaled his presence on flowing out onto the leaves where Bobby sat.

Instantly pain burrowed itself into the roots of Bobby's hair as Lonnie lifted him with one hand and threw him across the forest floor. After a backhand slap he tasted the warm salt flavour of his bleeding mouth. Then Lonnie's boot came up under him and cracked his ribs. For a long moment there was peace until he regained his consciousness. He was naked, his chest and abdomen across a moss-covered cedar log down near the swamp. Lonnie's one hand was curled through Bobby's hair and was yanking back his head so that he could see the stars. He could feel Lonnie's familiar touch as he prepared him for the ritual. He felt his nakedness, his loss of soul, his hopelessness and he prepared himself for the pain. The cold stars watched him, waited for him to call them in his strange voice.

Lonnie penetrated Bobby but Bobby instead of screaming summoned up all the power within his soul and brought forth the strange voice, the moan of a harmonic universal tune that shook the stars loose from their appointed places in the moment of time. The stars moved and Bobby sang in wonderment and awe. The stars traveled into organic single-celled shapes like those that swim in a single drop of water beneath a microscope, and Bobby moved too into their dimension into another appointed place in another moment of time.

In that instant too Lonnie was left alone in the forest spilling his seed upon the ground and where Bobby had been in that other moment of time and space, a mother moccasin disturbed in her hunt for smaller things than Lonnie, out of fear, like lightening buried her fangs deep into the fat folds of Lonnie's belly. In the dark silent forest beside the swamp Lonnie watched the stars float like microscopic creatures in the drop of water, then break apart into their appointed places in the standard moment of time. Lonnie watched lying flat on his back for a long time before all images turned from rippled water and cellophane into a final darkness.

David Fraser likes to balance his life among a variety of activities in the areas of writing, education and sports. When he is not formally working as an educator, he is either writing and researching or involved in one of the following sports: alpine skiing, ski teaching as a full time professional ski instructor at Mt. Washington, BC http://www.mtwashington.bc.ca/winter/default.cfm , windsurfing, tennis, golf, cycling, hiking. In addition he likes to garden, listen to the blues, and search for his way through Taoism. He has built his second water garden which has become his new daily sanctuary. His is learning and refining his Spanish fluency and will travel back to Central and South America in the near future. He lives among the flora and fauna of the British Columbia West Coast. David is the editor of Ascent Magazine - Aspirations for Artists (established 1997).

Email: David Fraser

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