Sunday, September 20, 2015

They Were Dolphins, Chapter 1 part IV

He gets dressed and opens the stall door. He is surprised by the number of people crowded around and fussing over him. He is surprised to learn that they all know his human name, even though he has no idea who these adults are.

When the unwarranted hubbub dies down and the boy assures them he is fine, he follows the nurse back to the examination room. He is disheartened to see his mother in the office.

He knows that the look on her face is hatred for having been bothered to come to school on his account. He doesn’t know what adults do during the day. He assumed that they go to school like other kids, and he wonders what subject they were studying when her principal sent someone to get her from her classroom.

He quickly calculates how to play up the medical issue with his knee so that he can deflect any punishment that is surely in store for him. He understands the power dynamic well enough that he figures the principal will stay execution of his paddle and turn the matter over to the discretion of his mother. He further anticipates that he can play off her maternal instincts to almost completely avoid any complications.

The boy is released to his mother’s custody, and she tries to take the sting of embarrassment and humiliation for her son’s actions out on him. He plays up his sickness well almost as a professional actor would. He even begins to limp as they walk to the car. They drive home over the bridge, past the dump, up the hill and past the trivium in a short squat brown car named after a horse that was famous for exploding in flames when hit in the rear.

On the way home in the dangerous car that jolted with the poorly operated gearbox grinding the whole way, the boy was mildly castigated for having his head in the clouds and told that he should grow up. Outwardly, he is repentant. Inwardly, he is dubious about the usefulness of the instruction. He is incapable of growing faster, and he does not have his head in the clouds. Otherwise he would be quite tall indeed.

At home he is laid up on the top bed of the bunk he shares with his younger brother. A poultice of chamomile and hemp is applied to his leg and his mother actually looks concerned as he lays on the bed pretending to recuperate. His plans are going almost exactly as conceived.

His mother actually is a student as he had guessed, but not in elementary school like he is. She goes to a university where she is studying to become a doctor. He supposes that she really is a good doctor, because she always seems to know what kinds of teas and leaves were good for this or that ailment. The poultice was the perfect temperature for his skin and really did feel like it was helping his boil. He felt like his fever was subsiding and didn’t feel as restless and wandering.

But if she is a good doctor, he wonders why she cannot tell that she has given birth to a dolphin instead of a boy. His brother is obviously a normal human and not a dolphin, so the boy wonders if perhaps this is just some normal mutation that occurs in humans where a boy dolphin is born in human form before transmuting back to dolphin at some point.

Outside of his bedroom window he can hear the burbling of a series of tanks the neighbour uses to farm fish. He can hear them leap and splash at random intervals. The hum and gurgle of water is continuous, but disappears if one is not listening for it. He wonders if he was actually not born to his mother originally, but perhaps was farmed next door.

The neighbour wouldn’t have wanted a baby dolphin eating his tuna (or whatever kind of fish the neighbour raised), so perhaps (the boy imagined) his mother had reluctantly adopted him and changed him into a boy to fit in better with society. The theory was impeccable and could not be defied with logic.

The boy can hear a group of adults laughing and talking in the living room of the house. They must be fellow students of his mother’s. They often have parties late at night and some mornings on the weekends, the boy has woken up to a pile of sleeping bodies strewn about the house. On these occasions he picks his way carefully among the slumbering giants to go outside to play. A strange mixture of odours fills the house on these mornings, a smell of skunk, fermented malt, and medicine.

Sometimes he finds the vinyl record collection scattered around the house and he holds up the album covers to stare at the covers intently. He sees a drawing of a white triangle with a white line entering on one side and a rainbow of colours emerging on the other. He sees on another cover a picture of a man in a pink jacket looking over his shoulder with ridiculously large aviator sunglasses stepping over the frame of a picture to step on a yellow brick road. Yet another cover is of two men well dressed in business suits shaking hands while the man on the right stands in flames that lick at the very edge of the picture and blacken the frame.


The poultice had grown cold and clammy, with slimy green juice staining his sheets. He called out for his mother to come but got no answer.

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