The Boy Who Melted

by Travis McBee

spread across my skin as it would across an oil slick at sea. The fire grew knives, thousands of them, and plunged them into every inch of skin they could find, twisting them sadistically so that the pain was not just acute or widespread, but somehow both at once. I screamed but for a second, a simple sharp yelp, before my brain, unable to handle the kind of pain my melting skin threw at it, shut down. I went limp, the world went black, and I fell to the ground, rocked with spasms like an epileptic in the grip of a grand mal.

  My father heard the sharp squeal and glanced up from his paper just in time to see me keel over into the sand. He rushed over to me and scooped me up, thinking that I was, in fact, having a seizure, only to see the sores erupting all over my body.

  Yelling for my mother, he rushed into the house, wiping the precipitation from my face and unknowingly saving my life. The two of them rushed me into the car. Thankfully the new house I had purchased for them was within a mile of the hospital, my real home.

  This time doctors figured out quite quickly what had affected me so drastically. What they didn’t know is how or why the rain did what it did to me. The first suggestion of aquagenic urticaria, an allergy to water, was quickly debunked. The sores that erupted on my skin were not typical hives but malignant skin lesions, and I had taken hundreds of baths by this point. Somehow, even though they didn’t understand what they were dealing with, they managed to stop the advance of those deadly sores before irreparable harm was done. Even then, to this day hundreds of little white scars cover my skin, which, I have heard, look quite similar to the scars left by chicken pox.

  More tests followed. The doctors tried their best, I’ll give them that. They put me through endless experiments to sort out the reason for why rain assaulted me. They sifted through the trace materials found in rainwater, isolated them, and exposed me to them one by one. This crude allergy test revealed nothing. No matter the substance, my skin stayed unblemished.

  After a few months, the doctors grew impatient. They collected a vial of rainwater and dripped it onto my leg so as to witness my agony firsthand. To their surprise, nothing happened. They then doubted their earlier conclusion that rain had been the guilty stimulus.

  Most of the experiments are vague in my memory and only really known by myself through other sources, but I do remember one day sitting in a room while a machine in the corner pumped mist into the air. I would guess that they wanted to see if I responded negatively to a humid climate—a stupid test, really, seeing as Georgia is always humid.

  The tests continued without result, until one day a young intern decided that I didn’t have a medical condition at all. His assessment was that my parents had simply used acid on me, twice, so that they could enjoy the financial benefits of having a freak in the family. This might not have been such a bad hypothesis, and I might not hate him with every fiber of my being, if he hadn’t tried to prove it, nearly killing me as a result.

  One night, my parents gone along with most of the staff, the young intern came to me. “We’re going to go for a walk, would you like that?” he whispered.

  I nodded, eager to get out of the room where I had stayed for months.

  The intern unplugged the machine that monitored my condition and lead me down the hall.

  If I had been older, I would have figured out what he was doing straight away. Thunder roared outside and rain pattered at the window. It was summer and we were in the midst of one of the omnipresent thunderstorms that come with it.

  The young intern led me out a back door. A little metal awning kept the rain off of me, but I could hear it pattering down on its thin roof and spray kicked up from where the rain pounded onto the dirty cement landing.

  “No,” I cried. “No take me back in.” I knew what rain was. I knew what it had done to me, and suddenly I knew what that man intended to do.

  “It’s okay,” he reassured me. “Nothing bad will happen.”

  He scooped me up, grabbed my right hand in his, and stuck it out of the awning’s protection and into the torrent.

  I lost that hand within ten minutes. My parents sued that intern for every penny he had left over from student loans, but that didn’t solve anything. Their freak show son was now even more of a freak show. A melted face, missing hand, and absolute terror of even venturing outside made me more profitable than ever. Yet none of the “concern” translated into a cure. I was still the boy who melted.

  So there I stood, watching rain fall outside my bedroom window and wondering once again just why it was that I existed. What was the point in living if I could never venture outside for fear of a single drop of precipitation? For seventeen years, I simply observed the world through a window or television screen. Reading a book was the closest I’d ever come to feeling the sand of a beach between my toes or the gentle tickle of a summer rain. Gentle tickle, ha.

  I hated my parents sometimes. Well that’s an outright lie. I loathed my parents all the time. A fortune was made off of my misery. A fortune that was now mostly gone, squandered away on sports cars, jewelry, and ever nicer houses.

  “The larger house is for you, dear,” my mother would croon. “You’re stuck inside so we need to make the inside as big as possible.”

  That’s a laugh, really it is, a cynical, evil, depressed kind of laugh. If the house was for me, then why did they insist on staying in Georgia, where the only thing that matched the frequency of rain was the unexpectedness of it? A day that started out with a perfectly blue sky could easily end in a thunderstorm. Going outside, even wrapped in a thick poncho, was as stupid as holding a cyanide pill in my mouth and trying to eat around it. Had I not learned that, when I was eight? Was the missing chunk of my right calf not enough reminder that sometimes rain suits ripped? It was enough for me.

  If my parents had cared, they would have moved to a nice desert. Nevada was dry from what I hear, or perhaps the Sahara? But no. Our friends were in Georgia. Our friends. What a lark. I had never been in a school. I had never been in a chess club, science club, or any club. The only friends I had were of the internet variety, strange gamer tags and nerdy witticisms. Those weren’t true friendships. I didn’t even know most of their real names. Sure, gmrgrl687 was very sweet—when she wasn’t lobbing grenades at me—but she didn’t know my name. She didn’t know that the reason I was never very good at the games was due to the fact that the little claw I wore where my right hand used to be couldn’t really handle the controls all that well.

  Oh, my life was just grand, and as I stared out at the rain, I wondered just how such a grand life should best end: a rope hung over the banister, my father’s pistol, or perhaps a quick jaunt outside into the rain that made it all possible? Oh the possibilities.

  The phone on my desk rang and I turned my eyes away from the outside world to answer it.

  “Johnny?” my mother’s voice said. “Your father and I’s flight was canceled. It looks like we might be stuck here for a few more days.”

  “What a shame,” I said, not even attempting to cover up my scorn. The two of them had gone off on a whirlwind vacation to Rome. I, of course, was invited. I was always invited, but my stupidity only went so far. There are a lot of times spent outdoors on vacation, and it tends to rain outdoors.

  “I’m sorry, dear. We’ll call as soon as we get a new flight, and we’ll bring you some pasta.”

  “Delightful,” I muttered and ended the call.

  Should I have hated my mother the way I did? Perhaps, perhaps not. She did care about me. Somewhere deep down she cared. The fact that she had exploited me never crossed her mind, I’m sure. But sometimes facts are facts, and exploited I had been.

  It would end soon, though. In a few months, I would turn eighteen, and, perhaps, my life could truly begin. I glanced at the piled pages of my manuscript upon the desk. My memoirs, my horror. There had been books published about me before, but the proceeds had not been held in trust. My name was one without a penny to it. I hoped this book would change that, but I worried all the same. The stor
y of my condition had been front-page news once, but that time had passed. I had faded into obscurity as I aged.

  If, as I hoped, that manuscript did provide me with a windfall of cash, I would move out from under my parents’ wing and out of this godforsaken state. I would head somewhere dry, to one of the glorious deserts this world provides. Then, perhaps, I could walk under the sun and stars and dream a life of being normal, even as the scars of my abnormality haunted my every step.

  I replaced the phone in its cradle and walked out of my little office. The house was delightfully quiet when it was empty, and I would have felt relaxed if not for the constant, threatening patter of rain on the roof. It was a sound I loathed and feared. Whenever it rained at night, I dreamt of leaking roofs and dripping water. It’s easy to have nightmares when your life is one.

  The kitchen was usually well stocked, but since my parents had been away for two weeks, I opened the fridge door to find my selection limited to a few slices of bologna and some curdled milk. Delightful. I slammed the door closed and crossed to the granite-covered island. I had eaten lunch there while tiddling away at my book on my laptop which was still standing open next to an empty plate.

  I powered up the laptop, made my way to a local pizza parlor’s website, and