A Midnight Stroll

Copyright © 2013 by Travis McBee

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Smashwords Edition

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www.TravisMcBee.com

A Midnight Stroll

Travis McBee

Table of Contents

The Boy Who Melted

Afterward for The Boy Who Melted

The Squirrel

Afterward for The Squirrel

Empty Roads

Afterward for Empty Roads

The Millionth Problem

Afterward for the Millionth Problem

Being Naughty

Afterward for Being Naughty

Famous

Afterward for Famous

The Bed

Afterward for The Bed

The Boy Who Melted

Rain. Always rain. It fell around me, destroying the peace of the afternoon; turning the pavement black; keeping me inside. Insidious rain: my jailer; my executioner.

I was three months old when my parents discovered my abnormality. They had taken me to my grandparents’ house to meet the extended family. Everything had gone well at first; the people doted on me, the new little baby. Nobody paid much attention to the clouds gathering like wolves on the horizon. To them rain was simply rain. To me, as everyone would soon learn, it was death.

By the time my parents decided that it was time to make our departure, the first fat drops of rain were falling upon the hood of our little station wagon. My mother whisked me outside in my little car seat, swinging the handle gently in the rocking fashion I seemed to enjoy. The car sat less than ten feet from the door of the house, but it was too far.

As we made the short trip, a drop of rain fell upon my face. A lucky shot, seeing as the little circle of my face was the only part of me not covered by thick clothing, but if luck was involved that day—or in my life in general—it was of the bad variety.

I began to cry at once. I wailed and threw my tiny limbs around with as much force as I could muster, but my mother paid little attention. Her lack of concern would be my own fault, for I was one of those horrible babies that screamed more than slept, and because of my love of screaming, my mother was conditioned to mumble a few baby words to me, screw a pacifier into my mouth, and leave me to my own devices. It was the action she took that horrible, rainy day, and my torture began.

Rain plastered the windshield as we drove through the winding back roads. The rain was a torrent now, blistering the road. The wheels kicked up sheets of water which hummed on the wheel wells. Like all children, I was relegated to the back seat where my car seat was turned around, giving me a wonderfully boring view of the stained cloth upholstery. The roar of the rain, windshield wipers, and cars rushing past in the other lane was loud, but my screams drowned them all. My little body rocked around in the tight straps, and my voice split the air with the persistent, piercing cries of a baby.

As I said, I was a bad baby. Screaming was the norm for me. I screamed when I wanted a bottle. I screamed when I wanted a new diaper. I screamed when I wanted the little airplanes above my crib turned on, and I screamed when I wanted them turned off. Everyone learns to ignore what is always happening. People do not stop to be amazed at the constants in life: that they are breathing or that their feet somehow manage to move them along without concentration. My mother learned not to become too concerned when I wailed. For that, I take responsibility, but I cannot—although I’ve tried—absolve her or my father of their actions that day.

The ride from my grandmother’s house to our own took an hour and a half. To my parent’s dismay, I managed to scream the entire way. They thought, of course, that what troubled me was simply the loud noise of the driving rain or an empty stomach. How were they to know that the single drop of rain was torturing me with all of the effectiveness of thumbscrews? How were they to know that, for once, I genuinely needed their attention?

The rain had abated by the time our little car finally pulled into the driveway. My father, having been tortured by the rain in his own way, ran into the house to relive himself, leaving my mother to discover the monstrosity that had once been her son.

She swung open the backdoor and reached in to snap open the little belt which held me in place. She never got that belt off, because at that moment, she caught sight of my face, and her screams joined my own.

My face. Oh, my awful face. It had been the little chubby excuse of adorableness a few hours before, my cheeks cherry red and puffy, my eyes glittering wickedly. But now, now, a red welt that stretched from my forehead to the tip of my nose obscured those features, decimating what had once been cute. That welt swelled and pulsed, a white piece of cruelty surrounded by angry red. At the center of that cataclysm was what forced my mother away from me—even when her maternal instinct told her to scoop me up and heal me by sheer force of will. They tried to describe it to me later, but the doctor’s photographs spoke more clearly than anything they could have uttered. Rotten. The center of that angry sore was rotten, rotting, and rotted. The flesh had turned black and a hole sank deep into my face, deep enough that the doctor could later insert his cleansing swab a full half inch. That part of me had died and decomposed within the short, agonizingly long, car ride. It was my simple misfortune that the drop of rainwater struck just over my right eye. The infection that spread took that eye, half of my nose, and the upper part of my lip—how I managed to keep screaming, they did not know.

My mother, to her credit, recovered quickly and screamed for my father. The two of them then rushed me to the hospital where I spent the next three weeks perplexing doctors. They could not figure out what had so disfigured me. Some of them proposed a virulent strain of leprosy. Others suggested a violent allergy. Still others accused my parents of pouring acid on me.

I became a case study. They sent me to a specialist in Atlanta who then sent me to New York. It didn’t make any difference; none of them could discern what had really happened.

After almost a year of constant experiments, they repaired my face as best they could. I would never see out of my right eye again and they could never fix the deep, sunken pit that was now my face. They sent me home.

What accidently happened to me was horrible; what my parents allowed to happen was even worse. Word spread of my condition, as is expected, and soon the vultures of misery descended. Talk shows, hosted by doctors who pretend to care about something other than ratings contacted my parents. The producers of those shows offered money, extravagant amounts of it, and my parents were unable to resist. I became a freak show. Oh, sure, the people who tuned in thought that they actually cared about my situation, that by watching the show they helped understand what had happened to me, but what they really saw was a little boy who had had half of his face melted off. Those people are no different from the circus goers of a bygone age who gaped at the bearded ladies and conjoined twins. They don’t care; they simply delight in the misery of others, covering their guilt with feigned concern.

I made the rounds of these shows, news programs, and scientific symposiums. My parents grew rich. I grew famous. A famous monster. Isn’t that nice? Move over Frankenstein, John Woodward is in the house.

Like all things popular, the interest in me faded over time. My parents moved to a new, spacious house in an upscale district where they rewarded me for my suffering with a larger bedroom and a playroom full of toys. I was still of interest to the medical world, and thus spent a large portion of my first three years of life inside of hospitals. Through some kind of luck, I managed to avoid the rain for those three years, but it was only a matter of time until it caught me again.

It was an overcast day when it happened. I had toddled outside onto the manicured lawn which I had paid for. My father was out there as well, watching over me as he sipped at a beer and read a newspaper.

I had assembled a nice little village in my sandbox. A castle, nothing more than a mound of sand with a few, bucket shaped towers, stood in the center of toy dump trucks, fire trucks, and airplanes. I was in the process of smoothing out a runway for my burgeoning airport when the rain came.

Unlike the fat drops that had disfigured my face, this rain was a gentle, cooling mist. The moisture alighted on my skin like a fine sheen of sweat, and the pain erupted.

I had known pain like it before. There is no doubt that the pain I suffered while that single fat drop had destroyed my tiny face had been excruciating, yet because of my age, I had somehow forgotten that agony. It would not be the case for the force that ransacked my existence when that mist covered my body.

Fire. That is the best I can do. Fire 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