6 months earlier
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“Come on, boy! Do something! She’ll get hurt!”
The round boy with the enormous pair of spectacles perched on his rather small nose hears the words but has no idea what they’re about.
“What... do... you... mean?”
“Look!” shouts his neighbor, leaping over the hedge. The boy’s gaze follows him, and only then does he notice his foster mother lying amidst the still-glowing remnants of an overturned fire basket, screaming like a pig. It’s their own backyard, yet he doesn’t understand what’s happened. Not a clue. As usual.
“Help her up! Grab her arm!” Automatically, he obeys, but as he reaches out, his foster mother recoils as if his hand were a snake.
“Don’t touch me, devil child. Stay away from me.”
Although their neighbor has helped her up and extinguished the last smoldering embers on her back, she continues screaming and cursing, determined to ignore the fact that she’s perfectly fine, and when she turns her head to face him, her expression shifts seamlessly from fury to helplessness.
“John, you saw everything. That little son of a bitch pushed me into the fire. You are my witness.” The neighbor raises his eyebrows in surprise.
“But Clarice, what are you implying? Your son didn’t do anything—he didn’t even move.”
“He’s not my son,” she hisses. “Against my will... Never wanted... Emotional blackmail...” Then louder, “He did push me, as sure as Satan has a tail.”
“No! Certainly not!” the neighbor says, more firmly now. “He didn’t lift a finger.”
Meanwhile, the boy has tuned out. He struggles to concentrate—it’s a condition. He gets easily distracted. There’s an official diagnosis, though he can’t remember the name of it.
He looks mesmerized how snippets of paper dance up and down above the fire basket. Some small, some big, some virtually unspoiled, others completely charred. On the whiter pieces, something is written in a beautiful, elegant handwriting, entirely different from the crude block capitals his foster mother scribbles her shopping lists in.
There’s something significant about the handwriting—he can feel it. It has something to do with him, though he doesn’t understand why. He only knows he can’t allow the pieces to drift away.
Instantly, they hang motionless in the air. The crackling of the fire fades. His neighbor and foster mother stand completely still opposite each other with unmoving, sculpted faces. The neighbor staring at his neighbor’s hate-twisted look of disgust, as though he sees her for the first time.
The boy doesn’t care about any of that; he only wants to know what’s written on the scraps of paper, so he plucks one from the air and begins to read. It’s only a fragment, but it’s enough:
“...must know that all this time I have loved you and still do. It breaks my heart that you don’t write me back. Maybe that’s what I deserve, but I hope you can bring yourself...” The rest is too charred to make out.
And then, it all comes flooding back to him—his foster mother’s demonic laugh, the enormous stack of letters she had dropped, one by one, into the flames after tearing them to pieces. The taunts and loathing. He remembers his shock and dismay and how her movements slowed in the middle of one of her dramatic gestures. He sees his own feet walking up to her and his own hands giving her the slightest push, just enough to topple her into the fire basket. He remembers how after that, his mind went blank until the moment he heard his neighbor shout, Come on, boy! Do something! and everything started moving again.