Innocence - A Short Story by Luke Dery

Innocence

He was a man on a mission, but he was only a boy. Covered in sweat yet bearing no fear, this little boy made his way down the dark red brick path. He knew where he needed to go; where he needed to be. It didn’t matter how long he walked, how tired he felt, or how much pain he endured. He would walk on until he was done. Done: it can be called a fool’s word. Nothing is ever really done, for everything constantly endures. Nothing stays the same, so nothing can be done. Well, this boy had already constantly endured, so out of all of us, he was closest to being “done.” And dear God he had to be. This boy didn’t bear a name. Someday, long before in his life, he may have had one. Whatever it was, no one knew, or maybe no one cared. It was entirely possible, as sick as it sounds, that no one wanted him to know. This little boy had been cast about like a boat on a storm-ridden sea. He never stayed in the same place, and he never returned to where he had been. He never saw where he was going; he never knew what he was seeing. To this little child, there were no answers, and there were no questions. Questions were not tolerated.

            The boy had no recollection of his past life. All he could remember was the extent of the previous year, which offered little to reflect upon. All that the boy knew was the dark, cold, and sadness of pain. He ate little, slept barely, and cried much. He didn’t like it when he cried. They didn’t like it when he cried. Who? His leaders; his masters. They were the only people he saw throughout each day. The men in the masks. The masks made of cloth. The boy barely caught a glimpse of them. Three times a day did they visit him in his cramped jail cell. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as sparse as they were, were his only company. When the men slowly opened the door to the pitch black cavern, the boy could make out the outlines of their bodies. They slid the plate of food to him from the doorway, with the plate usually losing half of its contents on the way. Then they were gone. Not a word, not a face, and not a smell besides the musty smell of cold food.

            They were men, the boy knew that. They wore magnificently simple costumes that fluttered in the drafts of the boy’s cell. However, all the boy could distinguish was the outline of a fine mask. A square mask, fitted for the human head. It was a beautifully scary mask.

            He tried to escape many times. They didn’t like when he tried to escape. There were no windows in the boy’s cell, so the only way out was the door. The door was locked, and the cell was so dark that even the feel of the frigid cold was lost in its black hole. But yes, he had tried to get away from the madness of this jail. One time, when the men opened the door to give him his food, the boy slipped by under their feet after hiding himself in the shade of the moldy wall. They caught him. He was doomed from the start of his plan. After being in the dark for so long, his eyes were not ready to face even the faintest light on Earth. It hurt, it burned, and the boy squealed.

            The men weren’t bad men. When they caught the boy they didn’t bring him any pain. They just simply stared at him. It was still dark, but he could feel them breathing around him. He could feel their eyes. He tried to touch one of the men once, but it always seemed as if they were the air itself. Untouchable. So they stood and stared at the boy. Once, one of them patted his back, and ruffled his long, dirty hair. They seemed so strange, but they were normal to the boy. They brought him no pain, yet they led him to so much misery.

            Today he was let go. Today he sees light. That little boy has freedom, but only the freedom to serve. The men let him free. They never even told him what to do. The men simply placed a package in the boy’s hand and let him out of his muggy cage. Somehow, the boy knew his task. It needed to be done, and he knew that.

            As he walked through the streets of the city for the first time in months, the boy heard commotion about the population of people. People were talking. It seemed as if people never stopped talking. He heard whispers of the power struggle against the king. Many people did not want the blood line to continue. They wanted change, and it was a change that no heir could bring. Talks of upheavals and assassinations roamed around the boy’s ears. But he wasn’t scared; he hadn’t been in a long time.

            He kept walking, as if he knew where to go. It scared him though, because he knew exactly where he should be heading, and he obeyed his guiding mind. The boy saw a man sitting and reading a newspaper. The man was tall in stature, and was wearing a brown hat. His jacket was also brown and bore shining buttons. The man was reading aloud about the king, presumably talking to a lovely lady nearby.

            “Ah, Bessie, here’s another load of bull,” he said, revealing his strangely spitting dialect.

            “Old King up there says he’s lost something, something pretty dear to him, but he won’t say a word about what it is. What do you make of that, Bessie?”

            The woman rolled her eyes, seeming more annoyed by the man than the sentence he had just read.

            “Harold, you know that man’s a coward,” she groaned in an utmost nasty manner.

“He’s trying to win sympathy from the people. Sucking up to us like a baby. Damn him, the coward. After what he did, no one’s going to believe his fake tears.”

            The boy moved on. He had never lost anything, but he had never owned anything either. “Things” were unnecessary.

            Finally, he was there. The boy stood at the front door of an old cottage. The shingles on the roof were cracking and falling to the ground. The windows were fogged and dented by heat, and the bricks in the wall looked far too weak for safety. The door was open, so the boy walked in. Someone must have been there before. Everyone shuts their doors, so something must have been amiss.

The boy approached the kitchen to find it was clear. There was no food, no people, and no supplies whatsoever. The table was split down the middle, and the chairs were missing various legs. The boy determined that this was not the place, so he moved towards the stairs.

The stairs were covered in dirt like snow after a storm. They creaked and they cracked as the boy made his way up them. He didn’t wince with the noise, but instead he enjoyed it. It was nice to hear things for as change, opposed to the eerie silence that had dominated his life so far. He reached the peak of the staircase quite quickly. He could move very fast. A light was shining down the upstairs hallway. It sparkled against the smelly walls, and the boy almost smiled. He caught his lapse in emotion, and moved towards the flickering light.

The room’s door was wide open, and the boy snuck in. In the room kneeling by the bed was a man. He was presumably praying, and the boy could hear both his whispers and his howls of sadness. The man knitted words and sobs together so tight that one left the other helpless to making sense. He was an astute looking man. Being well-dressed and clean, the boy assumed he was educated. The boy just stared at him.

The package. It ran through the small boy’s mind. He bit off the sealing of the package and spit it on the floor, then began the process of slowly unwrapping the item. Whatever it was, it smelled of pain. The boy took out the item and threw the wrapping to the floor. The item was a silver gadget, seemingly equipped with many features. It had a grip and a nozzle, and it fit perfectly to the hand. There were switches on it, but it seemed that none of them needed to be activated. The boy didn’t know how, but he knew what he had to do. Absolutely silent, he approached the sobbing man. He took the item, and pointed it at the man’s head. His target was full of clean locks of curly hair. The boy had similar hair, but it was weighed down and deformed by uncleanliness.

The boy didn’t know what would happen, but he readied himself as he held the item up to the man’s curly head. Then, the man turned and stared. With his blue eyes, the target stared into the boy’s eyes with sorrow. Then, the man became suddenly happy, and his mouth moved but could not produce words. The boy felt something in his head, or maybe in his body. It was a strange feeling; a good one. He hadn’t felt that ever, and it made him angry. Then the man smiled at him and began to mutter.

“Inocious? Oh my dear! Is it you?” said the man, almost in tears.

            That name. It didn’t sit well with the boy. It sounded so familiar and so comforting. He loved the feeling it gave him. The boy was scared, for he wasn’t used to the sensation that he was experiencing. He wasn’t himself or what he was told to be, and this man, the man who suddenly could control his feelings, was making him feel so lost and confused, so happy yet angry. He couldn’t take it. The boy hated feelings.

A loud bang was heard in the distance. Not a bang of happiness, but of pain. But happiness in itself and the desire to acquire it leads to pain. So maybe the shot that day was of happiness. Happiness found, or happiness lost, no one can say. The only ones that can say refuse to. They hear and stare blankly, pleasure not a familiar or needed feeling. As a symbol of what they are, they wear the blank square masks.

(© Luke Dery 2011)