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The Closed Door

The little boy loses his balance and almost falls in the hall. His head hits the mouldy wall in the corridor, right opposite the appartment from where he's just been chassed, kicked out and abused. Very shocked and frightened by the eventual retaliation he stays standing, his back to his hangman a littled curled up, like a snail who hastens back into it's shell. A ridiculous armour when the deadly foot comes. "Don't look back"

The boy shuts up and concentrates all the energy of his little person to hold back the tears that appear in the corner of his black eyes and that threaten, any time now, to gush down his tender doll-like cheeks, although swollen. Sean has learned also, to swallow the sobs that tighten his throat, never more to whine, to do nothing, not to say anything that could stir up the anger of the shadow that is now growing, that spreads out relentlessly on the wall, near his worried face. "Leave no trace"

Sean is scared stiff, he doesn't know what to fear next : the worst abuse, and the confirmed threats or the horrible silence more anguishing than all, that smothered whistling, that unbearable wait that excludes all issues, happy or fatal. More than often, fatal.
For the first time in his young life, even as he imagines the beast's hand outlined on his back, Sean begins to pray. And while staring at, with a soreful anxiety, the curiously motionless shadow, the little chap prays and prays again, with the fervour of despair. He prays all the night angels, the stars. "I hear your call"

Now, closing his eyes, he figures easily these sparks, spinning around in the semi-darkness of the hall as like so many glow-worms alarmed by a littled bruised boy's call. He sees them, he hears them. They are panic-stricken, the buzz, buzz and buzz louder and louder. The child can no longer stand it, he puts his hands over his ears, he remembers and opens his eyes. A draught brushes his neck and the door, behind him, slams. The shadow has disappeared and with it all fear.

In the hall set in complete darkness, the little chap lets out a long liberating sigh that flies away and loses itself among the aerian waves that draw in the darkness, as a spool of thread that unreels, drifts away and vanishes in the distance.

On his sore cheek, a drop runs, tickles the juvenile down, and ends up on the corner of his lips. With the back of his hand, Sean flattens the vagrant. He ignores it really, but his hand is red. Red from the blood that runs from his forehead and that draws winding traces on his face, shinny like freshly unearthed worms.

In spite of the tiredness and the shakings that ill-treat his little legs, Sean spins around like a little soldier, he moves away from the mouldy wall to which he'd been facing and of which he hadn't even noticed the horrible smell and steps into the fleeing space in front of him.

In the dark, he doesn't know where he's putting his feet and he enjoys this. Will he sink into some moving sand, will the ground give way under his feet... and if the ground, in fact filthy, was a garden of big clouds upon which careful walking was required, taking care especially to avoid going astray in the unsure and cheating vapours. "This is a game too far"

In the darkness, the little pounding of his feet echo in the space. What's real, in a place where the possible is Master, where the darkness allows all worlds ? What's reality ? Sean, the glow-worms, the clouds ? An injured child, an approaching hand, the tootsies in the dire filth ? What's real ?

A rattling interrups sharply the dreaming. The swutch tolls the bell. And the light came on... "Don't look back"