Yellow-Painted Room

He tells me I have this inscrutable ability to excel in anything I pick up…a golf club, a soccer ball, a few pages of a composition for class, a handful of wild flowers arranged in a clear glass vase, decoration on a sugar cookie, a pan of baked spaghetti, a zipped up coat with the pocket threading half gone. I am one of “them,” he tells me, as is he. His voice drifts over me as we lay side by side on the ripped up twin mattress with no sheets. I understand what “them” means…a collective entity of abilities, one of the special ones, the chosen ones, the ones who are meant to be great in this world. “You are one of “them,” Bird. The night he tells me this, I am floating into dream. I am in an empty room, devoid of all furniture, with its yellow-stained walls and no windows. The door is shut and bolted. His small form crouches against one wall, his four baby brothers spread out in different corners of the room. I can smell the dull malodorous stench of feces. The boy’s body is there, but his mind is traveling through a parallel world. I watch the small immobile body, his smooth brown skin. “Share my worlds, Bird, share my worlds.” He is a deer in that other world. A deer venturing out from its Winter home, its short, sleek hair hung close to its body-everything in earth tones. Slim, strong, beautiful legs, pausing and looking up with wary, gentle eyes. These are the eyes of his people. “Bird, this is what a writer does. We, dreamers. We have the ability to see through physical boundaries of fleeting lives, to suspend time. We have the ability to capture worlds, and the power to convey, makes the writer great.” “Yes, Penguin, you are right. We have that telepathic energy to see things that are far removed from us.” “Bird, I am one of them, the chosen ones. The ones without rest, without peace. I am one of five. Do you understand that?” I nod in my sleep. “My past, Bird, there is a little boy in my past who is lost. That little boy is capable of destroying you. This is what my family has given me.” In the dream, I am standing in front of his crouched form. I can feel his bowel movement, the strain of his small body. A body is being thrown against a wall. I can hear the sound of a baby crying. His littlest brother. And the shout of a man, his father. I can hear his mother being suffocated by strong, dark hands. The veins that are now bulging out from underneath his skin. The rage of a man with limbs swelling. The little boy in front of me can see him too. He sobs against the wall. “Who put you in this corner?” He doesn’t answer. He is not aware that I am in the room with him. His crying grows more urgent, and I spin around in a dervish jig, trying to find a way out for more air. It is too hot in here. I am confused. He always told me hell was cold. I see again, the form of a man, and the naked form of a small boy. I can see the man relieve himself on the boy, grunts emitting from that dark cavernous hole in his face, the shuddering body of the boy, now, tired and spent. The child in front of me wretches on the floor, his body going into convulsions. He wipes his bare hand down there where it aches. I take his hand from himself, and see there, a large bulbous blood clot. I look around for something-anything. There is nothing but the pissed stained walls. I have to puncture the clot…before it spreads. The alarm of it spreading makes me scream. In the end, I use my thumb, breaking the thin coating of coagulated blood, till it tosses and spills, dark purple, a warm pulpy mass, over my hands.