#* / dossier [ elias.r ]

[inceputuri]

a story in three acts.

Act. I

“—so he hasn’t caused any trouble?”

“no, it’s not that mrs. rhie.”

“ms. rhie.”

“of course, my apologies. ms. rhie, it’s not that he gets into any trouble. elias is a good kid, he is. if he could just talk more in class, perhaps be encouraged to participate more…”

the painting wall is blue. miss hawkings would ask him – what kind of blue, elias? eyelids dropping in a blink, little hands curl into fists as he thinks. he thinks it’s a dark blue. dark blue like the new car that mum bought for him yesterday. he wants to play with the car, it’s dark blue and silver. it’s like the car dad would have, he thinks. he blinks again, tiny fist curling in his mum’s coat. she’s still talking to miss hawkings, but elias wants to go home. his favorite program will be on the telly now. maybe he could play with the car and watch the telly, all at once. he tugs on the coat, shy eyes avoiding looking across where miss hawkings sits.

“not now, elias.” his mum shushes, hands patting away where his are held tight. she turns back, says something more to miss hawkings, but elias’ mind has already drifted. he wants to go play. there’s toys by the blue painting wall, maybe he could go play there. hands pushing on the seat of the chair that holds him, he pushes himself to the ledge, dangles –  -

— - miss hawkings will ask him, where are your manners, elias?

toes touching the ground through scruffy shoes, elias eyes miss hawkings again. she has big eyes behind her specs. they look like shells.

he takes a deep breath that feels too tight past his sweater, eyes flighty between where his feet barely scuff the ground and up to where miss hawkings looms. “may i please be excused?” voice small. he teeters along the ledge, fingers tight in small fists.

they’re quiet now. he thinks he interrupted them.

“what was that, sweetheart?” mum asks, and elias turns his gaze to her. his cheeks feel hot.

he mumbles it again, eyes glued to his shoes. she pats his back with an of course, darling, and he stumbles his way off the edge of the chair that had been sharp against his back. miss hawkings and mum continue talking, but elias has already wandered away.

later, when they’re back home, he has his favorite shiny car in his hands. he rolls it over the table – the telly is loud in the background. he’s chewing on his favorite sweets.

“mum, does daddy drive a car like this one?” he rolls the car back, and forward. the noises rumble in his chest as he makes them – that’s just how it would sound. vroom.

“i told you, elias – we don’t talk about dad. there’s no dad. he’s not coming back. are you listening to me?” there’s a shuffling before a shadow falls over him, and the car is taken from his small hands. it’s dark blue, and it’s shiny. It goes vroom. “no more talking about dad!”

there’s a huff of angry footsteps, and a door slam. on screen, dennis the menace decides on his next adventure.

Act II.

his name is noah. he’s shorter than elias, and about half a gut’s size broader than him too.

elias hates him.

he bikes his way to school before noah wakes up ( which isn’t hard since he works the night shift at the warehouse ), and bikes his way back perfectly timed to catch him in his early evening slumber. sometimes he’s not as good about it: spends too long with his headphones plugged in behind the shed that sits next to the building of his school, pencil scratching along the sketch pad he calls his own; bikes the long way back and doesn’t get home till the sun is already dipping; stops by the corner store at the end of town so he can buy himself the sweets he loves without running into the kids from school. on those days he comes back and has to sit there with a straight face and noah gets to talking, loud guffaws spilling past dull lips and framed by a face that needs shaving. he’ll slap elias’ back a lot, talk all over mum and say send him to work with me, an’ it’ll put some meat on his bones. or, what’ve you got your head shoved so down far in, boy – haven’t you got any friends to muck around with? every time he sees his drawing pad. ( he makes sure to shove it deep, far down in his backpack before even entering the house now. )

he thinks maybe noah thinks that this is them bonding. ( it’s not. ) he thinks noah’s taken over every corner of their home like a parasite that he wants to scrub clean until all he can smell is bleach. elias like his silences, and noah ruins them with grubby hands and a laugh that cracks. he doesn’t know, doesn’t understand how mum can be happy with a guy like that. how could she?

maybe it was a phase.

he stops hoping for it to be a phase when he comes back home one day, headphones shoved deep enough in his ear that he can’t hear the telly from where he’s sure noah is running it – and out comes his mom, pulling him in her arms like she hasn’t for years now. he can feel her shaking against him, and it alarms him ( it’s like he’s forgotten how to be held, feels the motions like it’s somebody taking puppet strings and tugging along his limbs ). his hands are grasping her elbows, thin fingers tugging away the ear buds as he pulls back to look at her.

“ma? –mum? what – -“ his voice cracks a bit, out of disuse, maybe. he feels like he hasn’t spoken all day.

“i’m pregnant!” she says, and those are definitely tears he sees in her eyes. his chest closes up so fast he thinks he’s going to throw up, stomach dropping somewhere past down the ratty converse lining his feet. he opens his mouth to speak and closes it again, tongue not used to speaking, let alone trying to put words to this feeling of – but i’m right here, mum? i’m right here? what do we need another baby for, i’m right here ma i’m – -

“wh—what I—”

“oh, elias.” she’s pressing a tight-lipped kiss to his forehead, and if he didn’t feel like his head was reeling, maybe he would have held her tighter and sobbed into her chest. he doesn’t get the chance to, though. she pulls away, bustling off into the living room to where he can hear noah is sitting. does he know? it’s got to be his.

a mini noah. a mini noah that was going to be his family.

his backpack hits the floor and there’s a few scuffles to be heard before the bathroom floor is slamming shut. he pukes up his lunch that day.

Act III.

he gets used to the idea of having another body in the house. not that it really matters when he spends so much of his time outside of it.

he’d liked the silences at home – he could shut his bedroom door and not have to see noah’s face, or mum’s, for that matter. and elias didn’t hate it, y’know. his room. or the home. he knew where the cracks and the dents were, and he could trace his gaze over the step where he’d tripped and lost his two front teeth. he liked that the kitchen window only got sunlight in the morning, and that his bedroom window only got it in the evening. the house was home, bodies, people that he didn’t keep around, all wrapped in casing of wood and steel.

company he could control, tolerate – want, without accepting disappointment.

but suddenly his home isn’t really his. it hadn’t been from the moment noah stepped in. but now – - now the stairwell corners are collecting miscellaneous toys from the store that mum thought were adorable enough to bring for the baby. little trinkets are collected, small spaces are claimed and made. he’d started feeling like a shadow sometime around eleven years old ( when his mother deemed him old enough to have his wits about, and stopped talking to him like he was her son, and started keeping him more like he was another memory of times lost ) – and it’s at the age of sixteen that he feels himself becoming a ghost. it’s like they’re building a life for themselves, with not even a damn ring on the finger, and he is the stowaway being cornered into the attic.

so he doesn’t come back home, much.

he stays out longer, says he’s sleeping over at ‘friends’places’ when really he’s tucked himself into the community park’s tree house – only to return home at the early crack of dawn. in fact, he does it so often, he gets used to the idea of it; starts putting it into perspective. he only has to be here for two more years, until he’s done with school. maybe it won’t be so bad. he’s done a well enough job at blocking noah out of his senses long enough to make him feel like a long-lasting, bad memory. maybe he can do the same with everything else that was changing.

( he doesn’t think about how that leaves a bitter taste in his mouth; the feeling that he belongs somewhere in the past, stowed away and forgotten – no place for him in this new life his mum was building. not him, not dad. )

they tell him it happens, sometimes. well – they tell noah, and elias is seated there next to him; quiet, numb. he can’t really feel his hands.

“there was nothing you could’ve done.” they say. elias can’t swallow past the guilt in his throat that screams: wasn’t there? wasn’t there?

mum doesn’t speak much anymore. not to him, not to noah. noah doesn’t come around as often either, but he hangs around enough. sometimes he sees him meandering by the front door when he comes back from school, having a smoke – like he’s wondering whether he should go in or not. elias doesn’t hate his guts half as much anymore. he starts to notice the little things, like how the right side of his face droops a little more than his left. how he has a shake to his hand. he sees it every time he lifts his hand up, half-stubbed cigarette sticking out between stout fingers.

if he’d hated being at home before, he really hates it now. the air feels so thick, elias feels like he’s choking on it all the time. the silences before used to sit heavy around his shoulders, now they cut – slice until it feels like his tongue is battling claws keeping it shut to his jaw any time he tries to speak. he doesn’t really speak to mum much. or at all. she spends a lot of time in the backyard, hands warm around a cup of her favorite tea on the rocking chair noah built for her. she spends her days sitting like that – she takes less and less shifts at the diner, spends more and more time with the setting sun.

elias doesn’t have the courage to ask her why.

he doesn’t know how he passes through a year of this. he’s spent about eighteen of them in silence, but somehow this feels worse. death hangs around them like a humid coating that won’t leave the sweat of their backs, and elias feels himself leaving his body more and more each day – outside, looking in. he goes through the motions like he has for the past four years of his life: goes to school, barely gets by, fucks about the town, comes back at night when it’s dark enough that he knows mum would have retired to bed, and he’s so tired that his eyes can’t keep themselves open. he tells himself, begs himself to remember that his body is his own – but the thoughts start to feel foreign in his mind. he learns to forget.

he’s already decided he isn’t going to spend the summer at home. ( or any season after that, at all. ) preparing for it starts to feel like a silent march of unsaid goodbyes. he plans it all. he’ll tell mum he’s off to a camp. she won’t ask more questions, neither will noah. ( he’ll be lucky, maybe, if they read the letter all the way through. ) and the letters will follow after that. little lies, telling him he got one lucky opportunity from here to there. he’ll run away as far as his legs can carry them, until he’s shaking so hard because he’s out of breath and there’s no more cobble-stoned paths for him to hear the fall of his feet on.

it’s the week of graduation before he’s had the chance to think about it too much. there’s a packed bag under his bed that he checks every night, zips and unzips until he’s had every single item in it memorized. it’s the week of graduation, and everyone’s out taking pictures by the city square waterfall. he didn’t see it because he didn’t go, but he knows that’s where they are. that’s where they’ve gone every year – black gowned kids with knobby joints and lanky limbs. elias stays at home, takes two steps at a time down to the living room where noah is sitting on the sofa chair. ( it’s become his sofa chair, after all this time. elias can’t look at the sorry dogtooth print and not think of noah and his ugly face. )

“you’ll come around more?” he has to force the words out of his chest, reach down and pull them until they’re sputtering – mangled, a little quiet. but there, in the air. he’s said them, spoken up to noah on his own for one. he sees the surprise on his face when noah turns to look at him, brows rising.

“—what?” he pauses, as if deciding what to do with this new turn of events. that is: elias, speaking on his own. “speak up lad, i can’t hear you.”

“you.” he says, gulps down the ball that’s building up in his throat and fixes him with a glare that’s narrow only because elias thinks he’ll crumble if he looks away. “you’ll come around here more, yeah? for mum?” he’s practiced these words so many times, over and over in his head until they feel like rote memorization from a textbook labeled – how to put a name to that sinking feeling in your chest & other ways to say goodbye without ever saying it. “she needs the company.”

there’s a pause between them. the telly crackles.

noah lets out a gruff answer that elias can only assume to be the affirmative, before he’s turning away. ( noah doesn’t try much to talk to elias nowadays. he gave up somewhere along the lines, elias thinks. ) “yeah. we both do.” and that’s all he says on the matter.

he never gathers the courage to talk to his mum. he puts it all in a letter instead, finding it all easier to write down. it doesn’t sound like a goodbye when he reads it back, even though elias has no intentions of returning. maybe it’s better this way. ( maybe it isn’t. ) it has to be.

he leaves the letter folded in a neat envelope, under the coaster she’s laid out on the table she sets her tea in when she sits in the backyard. his name is on the front of envelope, the cursive of the e and the l a little shaky. he never did learn how to write cursive too well. never mind that his hand had been shaking when he wrote it.

he boards a bus heading south the night after his graduation. there was a school sponsored grad party, on a yacht down thames of all things. elias doesn’t attend. that’s how it should be. ( that’s how it’s always been. ) he sits himself down on the last row, tucked all the way to the right corner, and hooks his headphones in to drown out the thoughts in his head. for someone so quiet, his mind is really damn loud – and it’s been saying the same thing for a year now.  

the sane part of his mind says, you can’t wish away a baby. you couldn’t have wished away mum’s baby. that’s now how this works. and he knows it. knows that isn’t even close to how things work. but then he thinks of the unknown mask of his dad’s memory and how angry his mum was at him for not being around, and he thinks of how he’s got nothing but a bag full of things to start a new life somewhere and thinks – maybe you can. maybe you can wish away someone after all.