by M. Matheson
It’s amazing how far and how long a nearly five-year-old boy could travel before being apprehended; one whole state deep into Georgia for nearly a year before my capture and placement in a foster home—the first in a long line. Blame my apprehension on the hooker that took me in. Together we survived by lifting items from Walmart and Target. Watches, electronic items, even some cameras. It was a glorious time of my life.
Add that to your file, along with the monster from church, and label it THINGS THE KID IS FULL OF CRAP ABOUT. While you're at it, you can thank your God I said CRAP instead of SHIT. Credit for that latter word goes to my first foster home; at least, ten times a day, “You better keep quiet you little shit, or I'll come down there—you can fill in the blanks. They weren't very original.” Down there was an unfinished basement with an off balance washer and dryer combo, piles of mismatched junk and my grungy mattress in the corner. My lack of fear seemed to be the matchstick that lit Mr. McCollum’s wrath. I’m sure of it. Even with his fat hairy belly that stuck out like a bulbous growth from under a stained wife-beater shirt, he had nothing on Mini-Godzilla. If that monster and I could have signed a truce, I would have sicced Godzi on him—sat back, sipped a Coke, and enjoyed watching him bite Mr. McCollum’s head off his shoulders.
Alex, the lady in red, was the best thing ever happened to me; she was dodging a Police cruiser when I met her in the alley moments after Mom became one with the blacktop.
She came clichéd as a script from a cheap movie, “Psst! Hey, kid over here.” She was crouched between a green dumpster and graffiti-covered cinder block wall. Pulling me in close to her firm body did nothing for a pre-K boy. Give me ten years and we'd be SMOKIN’! She gently rocked me and shushed away my fears. She was sheathed in a red silk dress that barely covered her butt, smelled like soap and radiated sympathy. I remembered wondering how she balanced on such high heeled shoes. Her hair was chestnut brown, silky smooth, and curled around her long ivory neck in a sultry embrace.
The police cruiser was seeking one or both of us. Who knows? It made crunching sounds as it slowly rolled over the detritus of the alley. Gentle as a feather, she held her hand over my mouth.
“Come on kid. Let's get outta here.” I didn't think of it at the time, but she seemed entirely unconcerned about the possibility that I was missing—which, technically I was—and which made her a kidnapper no matter how you sliced it. I had no one now to be unaccounted by, so in theory, I wasn't missing.
Thus began the greatest adventure of my life. Looking back, Alex (short for Alexandria), provided the most excellent home I ever had—sorry Mom. The monster was scared shitless of her, perhaps because she had no fear that I ever saw.
She shuttled me over the block wall and we sprinted towards a broken-down strip mall anchored by a small version of 99 Ranch Market.
“What's your name kid?” she said as we ran.
“Jonah.” She stopped in her tracks.
“No shit?”
“No sh—kidding,” I said correcting myself in Mom's memory.
“Your parents religious or something?”
I chose the latter since I had no idea what religious was. “Or something.”
“Where's your parents?”
“Dead.”
“Wha–”
Alex looked dumbfounded and hurt, and after an extended uncomfortable pause I volunteered. “It was a bus run my mom over.” She said it again; the S WORD, but caught herself halfway through this time.
“When?” I guess Alex never knew that kids my age have no concept of time, a week, day, hour, or year, they're all the same. I pointed in the direction we came from and somehow she got the drift.
She sat on the curb and buried her head in her hands. “What a fucking bitch. You got any other family kid?” I hung my chin and wagged my head. My plight had recast her life into a blissful paradise.
“Well, you do now. Here, hold my purse.” It wasn't as much a request as a kind motherly order. I looped the big padded handles over my shoulder and it hung to mid thigh. I looked stupid but passable as a kid with his mother.
I couldn’t read the signs, but we entered some sort of ethnic market with smells that made my nose twitch. There were cold meats in the deli case I was too shocked to ask about. Alex saw my dismay and told me they were PARTS. She brushed off any further questions.
She leaned over the counter and cast her bait to the middle-aged cashier. She spoke in breathy whispers, and he started breathing hard and fast; his gaze was locked like a tractor beam on her emerald eyes and ample cleavage. She grabbed four Boxes of Marlboro Reds from behind the counter and handed them to me. I stuffed them in her purse.
An elderly black woman behind us coughed politely and broke the spell.
We wandered around stuffing that big purse with Doritos bags, and cans of Pop, as many as it would hold. By the time we left, Slim Jim Pepperoni sticks bristled from the top.
My first crime, and all before I was five. I felt a foot taller.
“You were great kid,” she said. “Let's get outta here before Moe wakes up.” We ran down the street cackling like chickens. Mom hadn’t been dead an hour and I was running a crime spree with a beautiful prostitute, happier than I could ever remember. Three blocks away we sat down on a park bench and watched a playground full of kids and mothers while binging on our booty.
“Okay, Jonah, it's like this.” She pointed a half-eaten Slim Jim at me. “We need some money for a room, so I'm going to have to go do some work." Intuition told me it was better not to ask. I've been blessed with those kinds of smarts, so I ran out into the shrieking flock of kids and made myself disappear. Alex looked hurt, so I ran back and gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. I whispered in her ear, “I'll be here when you get back.”
One more laughing little head amidst the cacophony and I was easy to overlook; likely no one would try to match me to a nonexistent parent. The other moms tried to not look at Alex, and the few dads made it look like they weren’t.
The monster let me know he wouldn’t shake so easy. How a big thing like that could walk through the ring of redwoods surrounding the playground with no one (well not no one) noticing was extraordinary. An hour later I looked over and Alex was back at the park bench looking slightly disheveled with just a tinge of sadness. The monster hightailed it and ran off—Lickety-Split.
That was my first clue it was scared of Alex. If I was within fifty-feet of her, the monster never showed its face, tail, breath, or memory. It was as if he never existed.
We had a good run, it wasn’t until a year later that our dynamic duo was busted lifting watches in a Target Store. Alex went to prison, and I went to my first in a long procession of foster homes. Being with Alex was the closest thing to real serenity I ever found in this world. I pray there’s a next, but I doubt it.
Years later, in an attempt to prove or disprove the monster's existence, I set myself to some exhaustive research in the Tifton High School library. Half a century before my bio-father ever winked at my mother, I found what I believe was the monster’s first recorded existence. On their way to film a sequel to its hit movie Godzilla, The Toho Film Company’s plane crashed in the Okefenokee swamps. The wreckage was never recovered. According to my theory, the monster's spawn then spread across Georgia and Florida, which meant there were more of these accursed things, and more little boys or girls suffering a fate similar or worse than mine.
I turned sixteen that same year; no cake, no candles, no birthday cake. I had just bailed on what would be my last foster home in Tifton, Georgia. A lovely place to be sure, but not on your twelfth hour shoveling cow shit for the sixth day straight.
In all those years of running, I guess my biggest regret is I've never seen him face to face, not since that first time, and then it was more like tail to face. Since then, I’ve only ever seen shadows and heard its grunts and hellacious farts along with the sound of its swishing tail clearing deadfall from the forest floor. The worst is the clatter of its metall
ic scales as they drag across the concrete behind me buzzing in my ears like a herd of iron wasps.
As the sun sets, a boisterous wind kicks up. The one blank page I have left threatens to tear itself from the coil spring binding; nevertheless, I feel safe on this ledge. It's amazing what one can see from twenty-eight floors above Jacksonville. The monster was skirting the crowd, but I don’t see him now. Hopefully, he hasn’t conquered his fear of heights. No matter how far away he is, I can still usually feel his hot breath and hear the hornets nest sound of his rustling scales. But, it’s not there.
Shouts from the crowd below are wafting up in tangled barks of unintelligible phrases. I’m sure they think I’m going to jump.
The cops are pounding on the steel fire door I jammed with a four-by-four; the single access to the roof. No one will be interrupting my rest.
For the last page of my story, I’m thinking of a fitting finale, how best to create a synopsis of my feelings.
Compared to the last eighteen, my first five years were all cotton candy birthday cake days. But, then something sprouted—in the base of my soul. A dead tree slinking through the rest of my being. Crackling dried moss tendrils filled my body with its fibrous living death, snapping and popping like an old tube TV on the fritz.
If I slipped from this ledge, I figure the branches would break off like glass Skittles, a thousand squirming lizard tails of terror burrowing into the sad saps cheering for my demise.
Give them a taste of their own sanity, I say.
A popcorn monster.
It didn't work that way, though. Godzilla got bored took his lunch box and went home to the Okefenokee swamp leaving one sad young casualty to be lost in a myriad of statistics and reports.
The crowd gasped.
Nothing left but a news report.
With my story finished, the spiral bound notebook fluttered to the ground and landed in a trickle of muddy water. A five-year-old boy stooped to pick it up. His mother yanked on his hand nearly dislocating his shoulder. “Don’t touch that, Isaiah. You don’t know where that’s been.”
Isaiah, in the bible, was sawn in two.
THE END
Following the end is always a new beginning.
This story began its life as a WHAT IF?
What if a young boy was chased through life by Jonah’s Whale?
I appreciate that you took your time to read my tale.
Would you give it an honest review?
Best Regards,
M
About the Author
Other than dying a slow pleasurable death from the incurable disease of writing, I am a retiree, father, and husband. After having raised four daughters who are all well into adulthood, my wife and I are now bringing up a very active five-year-old boy. We live in Sacramento, California.
Early in life, I was sidetracked by a maniacally dysfunctional lifestyle but found later that those same troubles make for great storytelling. I’ve been blessed to take a wide bite out of life from motorcycle outlaw to Pastor of a church and missionary evangelist. I have seen a lot and traveled a lot; many things I wished I'd never seen or done and some I can't wait to do again, but each and every scrap makes fantastic fabric from which to weave a grand tale. Many if not most of the events in this book I have in one form or another experienced.
My greatest joy would be that you were moved in some way by my tale, or at the very least you simply enjoyed reading it.
Peace,
Mike Matheson
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