Tainted Redemption

New Words: Corral, Codger, Nacreous, Gusset, Univoltiine, Edaphic, Fasciculation.

This week on A Stray World...

It wasn't even a particularly interesting subject, but the school people brought in some people from the SPCA. Little fluffy balls of cuteness interspersed with pictures of diseased dogs with cigarette burns.

I was drawn to a crowd of my fellow classmates, around a blown-up picture of a cat with its intestines leaking from its tummy. Its eyes, stretched to thin lines of pain. Though I felt something like horror, I wanted to take a closer look, and pushed myself further into the crowd.

Through collective exclamations of disgust and laughter, I picked out Fry's voice, a nickname he earned from his slick, greasy way with people.

For some unknown reason, he waded through the crowd and shoved me in the chest, saying I was too young for this. He was barely two months my senior!

I was angry, and justifiably so. Why should I stand in a corner when everyone else was tracing the length of the intestine with their oily fingers?

More students were filing into the cramped hall, and our class had to leave. Filled with rage, I ran all the way back to class, or wanted too, but was once again stopped by Fry.

I can only speculate it was for his own amusement, but he had leapt onto my bicycle parked outside the classroom of my little brother. He gestured at me with a mischievous grin.

Rage unlike any other poured forth into my 10-year-old body, imbuing me with the strength to grab the bully by the throat before he could even raise his hands. Everything happened in slow motion, and I was rendered into an impartial observer, while my body acted on its own accord. Dancing to the pulsating melodies of hormones and unbridled emotion.

I pushed him into the glass windows, and the glass cracked. “Not like Jackie Chan.” I remember thinking. The bicycle fell under him and I stumbled.

The element of surprise though, was gone. And Fry, larger and taller than me, effortlessly shoved me onto the ground.

When my back hit the ground, it felt as if someone had shone a high-intensity light-bulb into my face while I was dreaming. Momentarily stunned and fearful.

Knowing what Fry would do, no longer as angry, but nearly as frightened, I kick my fallen bicycle and some part of it caught his oncoming foot. He stumbled and fell.

I got up, ready to run, or fight. But Fry didn't get up.

Cautiously, I moved over to the the red pool growing from the steady drips coming from the bicycle's handlebars.

Someone grabbed me from behind, strong hands wrapped around my body, locking my arms to my side. It was Black Man, my favourite teacher in the entire school. His face was grim, and his eyes looked not at his captor, but at the three or four teachers gathered around Fry.

I heard the words “hospital”, “dead”, and “eye”. Three words that built into a mountain of ice squeezed into a lead weight that now resided in my stomach.

I wanted to say “Sorry”. I couldn't.

Black Man picked me up like a helium balloon and we went to the principal's office.

Again, I wanted to say sorry, but another voice took over. It screamed and yelled my innocence.

“He started it teacher!”

“He sat on my bike!”

“Teacher, he wouldn't let me look at the pictures!”

They ring hollow now.

10 was too young an age for me to understand mandatory death. I asked my father on the way to court what mandatory meant. He didn't reply. Instead, he started reading aloud an Enid Blyton storybook. My mother, who sat beside me, looked out of the police van's window thoughtfully. Her hands rubbing my back in loving, concentric circles.

It was not deliberate, but unintentionally, they were telling me I would be alone.

That was twelve years ago. Then, I could barely reach the keyhole of my cell. Now, I can touch the black ceiling of my cramped prison quarters.

Apart from the prison wardens who sometimes double as my teachers, my parents were my only visitors, and nearly my only correspondence.

I once received a letter from Fry's mother. She cursed me and wished me dead. The words described the many levels of hell I would visit for taking away her son. One of them was to be killed the same way I had killed Fry, with the pointed handlebars of my bike jammed into the right eye. But repeated, again and again, for 100 years.

When I showed that letter to my parents when they visited me in prison, they asked the prison wardens to screen all letters (except theirs) addressed to me. And that was how I lost my childhood friends; at least, the remaining ones who had not taken to heart my former teachers' description of me being a naughty, bad boy.

I was still 10 years old then.

I can't really say I am a changed man. Perhaps I am. Because I am incapable of becoming angry at anyone anymore. No. Maybe it's because I am afraid of becoming angry.

Every night except for a few dreamless nights, I would find myself facing Fry, outside my little brother's classroom, with that mischievous grin.

And every night, I would say sorry, and walk away to another sunless morning. Knowing he would be back tomorrow night.

I want to die. But Mr Raj, my prison mentor, said I had to live. To live so I may do good and be forgiven by the gods.

When my shadow finally left the sprawling fortress of silence after twelve, I find myself not living to be pardoned by the gods, but hoping for the late reply from Fry's mother to my letter, sent when I was 10-years-old:

“I am sorry I killed Fry. Please forgive me, I want to go home.”