Sun and Moon (part 15)

He remembered the sandbox. He couldn’t have been more than six years old on that particular day. He had just carefully lifted up the plastic bucket from around a large perfectly tapered cylinder of sand. It had taken him ages to carefully lift the bucket, not moving it left or right, but straight up, so that the shape of the sand tower would be revealed with no blemishes. He already had a twig set aside, he’d picked it out before, knowing it was exactly the right shape for the flag. He was holding the twig in one hand, just about to begin the delicate process of pushing it into the top of his perfectly constructed little fortress, when out of nowhere an elbow crashing down and wrecking everything.

Clay was about to complain, but then he saw it wasn’t George’s fault – Eric had shoved George. That didn’t make it any better, but once he realized what had happened, he kept his mouth shut. He remembered hoping he wouldn’t cry. It’s not like he had a choice – crying either happened or didn’t happen, but when it did things got bad. There were stronger kids and weaker kids, and he was always somewhere in the middle. Eric was the absolute ruler, and there was no getting around that. George mostly just did what Eric said. Clay wasn’t up there with George, but at least he was better off than Eliot. Nobody wanted to talk to Eliot, or play with him, mostly because you didn’t want Eric to notice. You didn’t want trouble from Eric.

He was still holding the twig in his hand when the three ladies came by. It was a hot summer day and the sun was behind them – he couldn’t really see their faces. But he distinctly heard one of the women say to the other two “Oh look, they’re so cute!”

He’d thought about that moment for years to come. Being six years old didn’t feel cute. It wasn’t until years later that he learned about the word “feral”, but right away he’d thought about that day in the sandbox. They were feral, these little boys with their plastic pails and shovels and their hierarchy of fear. Those women didn’t know anything. Maybe it would have been different if he or George or Eric or Eliot or any of the others had had a mom or a dad, but that’s how it was in the orphanage.

***

“Terransky.” he heard, and looked up.

“What?”

“Terransky. What’s that? A Polish name?”

He shook his head slowly, “you know, it’s funny. I don’t really know. They had a whole process about that at the orphanage.”

“The orphanage?!” she looked at him agape. “You never said you were an orphan. It doesn’t show up in your records, or at least the ones we found.”

“Why, is that a big deal?” he asked, somewhat taken aback by the sudden look of intensity in her eyes.

She stared at him for a few more moments, and then she laughed. “A big deal? Yeah, kind of. No, I’d say calling it a big deal would be an understatement.”

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