Little Boy Nearly Dies due to Overexposure to Cesium Radiation

[Ganny 285]

Little Boy Nearly Dies due to Overexposure to Cesium Radiation

a short story

“Do you not like the way I teach?” demanded the overtly red mouth of an anger unrivaled.

“It’s not that…” whispered Little Boy. It was that.

“Oh? Then why do you find it necessary to craft small animal figurines out of smaller animal figurines right atop your desk, rather than pay attention?”

“I don’t know,” said Little Boy’s quavering voice. He did know. The truth was, apart from being a compulsive liar, the only thing that interested Little Boy was making small animal figurines out of smaller animal figurines. Ms. Teacher obviously was not only ignorant of this, but also saw no need to modify her educational strategy to reflect such a possibility.

“What do you think this is?” she snickered, holding his newest creation that it may swing to and fro above his eyes.

“That’s a hippo,” he told her passively, “made out of giraffes and smaller hippos.”

“Isn’t that just adorable?” Her fangs began showing – fangs of pure saliva. She threw the hippo to the floor, shattering it into its component giraffes and hippos. It was ruined. “Now pay attention,” she said. “It is time to learn about the life cycle of the fly.”

But Little Boy didn’t care about flies as much as Ms. Teacher did. All they ever did was fly, eat, and vomit. Fly. Land. Taste. Eat. Fly. Land. Vomit. He already knew the life cycle of the fly, and that was it. Fly, eat, vomit. Fly, eat, vomit.

Overcome by spontaneous queasiness, Little Boy proceeded to take his lunch out for some fresh air, directly onto Ms. Teacher’s spiteful shoes.

“Ugh! Disgusting!” she shouted, perhaps in reference to the half-digested food covering her footwear.

Little Boy went home depressed and hungry. Ms. Teacher had made him sad with her yelling. After politely gathering up his vomit from her person as well as the floor, he had done the same with the giraffes and hippos, rendered useless by the cruelty of gravity. He had then run out, crying, as the other students threw small bits of chalk and malice at his retreating figure.

He opened the door to Father, who was dizzy and dripping wet. He had obviously been bathing in alcohol. “You’re here two hours early,” he belched. “Why?” Little Boy didn’t want to say. Like most little boys, he was ashamed. “You blow chunks again?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Projectile?”

“Fountain.”

“You disgust me.”

So Little Boy ran to his room and cried a little. But his animal figurines made out of smaller animal figurines were there to comfort him with their cold, cold indifference. “Why doesn’t anyone love me?” he asked. As they were inanimate, they refused to answer. But he knew they cared. They didn’t. He picked up one of his loveless objects – a horse made out of small turtles and small prairie dogs – and caressed it carefully. It did not respond, but rather, like most nonliving matter, stared straight out unblinkingly at the walls of the dimly lit room through its wide, unforgiving prairie dog eyes.

Overcome with sadness fit for a king – an extremely sad king – Little Boy did not go to school the next day, which was a Wednesday, and instead squatted silently in the center of his room until noon, at which point he decided to run away from his depressing life and create a new, less depressing one, no doubt filled with happiness, friends, and small animal figurines made out of smaller animal figurines. He packed his things, which consisted of a toothbrush, a .38 revolver, and an extra pair of socks, and made his way to the front door. Stepping over his passed-out parent, he opened it with the great finesse developed only after years of opening doors and exited out into the bright new world he would bless with his adventures.

Little Boy then began traveling to the outskirts of his home town of Setting; he got to the end of the block and became lonely, so he walked back and retrieved his horse figurine made of turtle and prairie dog figurines. Stroking its head, he walked to the end of the very same block and proceeded to notice how very tired his tiny legs had become. Luckily, though, a nondescript, unmarked white van was passing. He notified it of his presence by running out in front of it and pretending he was a dinosaur.

“Child,” pronounced the round, squinty face of the van’s occupant, “remove yourself from my course of travel.”

After much negotiation involving many tears and crushed dreams, the round and squinty man agreed to drive Little Boy so that his miniscule feet would not break down from the pressure of too many steps. “My name is Squinty and Fat Man, but you should call me Mr. Fat Man. What may I call you?”

“My name is Little Boy.”

“That is a horrible name.”

Little Boy looked down sadly. “I know.”

“Shut up,” Mr. Fat Man calmly commanded. “I have to sell decorative walnut shells to passersby.” Little Boy was interested in this, but he did not want to speak because Mr. Fat Man hated him. So he kept quiet, as all small boys should.

Mr. Fat Man found a woman in a tan suit and approached her slowly in his smoothly moving vehicle. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, for this woman’s identity in such a respect as gender was particularly ambiguous, “would you care to purchase a decorative walnut shell on this fine, fine afternoon?”

She turned around. Mr. Fat Man noticed she was of the female persuasion and immediately grew reddingly bashful toward his mistake. Nevertheless, she shouted at him with relentlessly heated rage, and many angry sentences were born. “Walnut shells?! You have to be kidding me, you large and rather squinty freak! I – oh, what is that? That thing the passive and victimized-looking boy in your passenger seat is holding close to him for dear life?”

“Well…” said Mr. Fat Man, seizing the opportunity to make some cash and push a small child to tears, “let me check.” He snatched the object from Little Boy’s hands and ignored the saddened screaming. “It appears to be a small horse figurine crafted out of smaller turtle and gopher figurines.”

“They’re prairie dogs!” shouted Little Boy, attempting to use his sharp nails to break Mr. Fat Man’s skin.

“Prairie dogs? My husband’s parents enjoy the sight of prairie dogs! I shall purchase two.”

Mr. Fat Man grimaced, and an ounce of grease and oil seeped from the affected pores. “I’m afraid we only have one in stock.”

“A shame. I will buy that one, then. How much?”

“Eight fifty-one.”

“Very well,” she said. Then she paid for and received her new masterpiece of a creation. “Also, silence your child.”

Little Boy had continued his mosquito-like shrieking up to this point. Nine minutes in the bright new world and he had already been robbed. Depression seized his being, and water crowded his cheeks and ran down the sides of his silently shivering mouth.

“Say, idiot child,” began Mr. Fat man, “I agreed to drive you to a place after you distracted me by pretending you were a creature of the past; where, now, by the seven great gods who rule the seas, am I to take you?”

Little Boy wondered. He wondered, and he thought. He wondered, he thought, he pondered, he considered, he construed entirely new verbs of mental action and proceeded to go about acting on them, for he did not know where he wanted to go. Since everyone hated him, where could he possibly live a carefree life? He was broken on the inside, and he did not know where to go from there. What a hideous individual.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You are a pig,” replied Mr. Fat Man.

Little Boy knew he was indecent to himself and those around him. He felt sorry for this. “Where do you think I should go?

“Get a job.”

“Ok.”

So, eighteen yards later, Mr. Fat Man quite literally threw Little Boy to the curb. Recovering quickly with minimal injuries because of his flexible, juvenile bones, Little Boy was able to immediately look up and observe that he had fallen to a conversational distance from a knobby pair of kneecaps.

“Whom are you?” said a voice that did not belong to him. Its usage of “whom” was entirely ridiculous, but he did not care to correct it, for he knew he would end up wrong. He always ended up wrong. He looked up, and his eyes fell victim to the sight of a tall, lanky boy several years his senior. The boy’s face was seared with hatred.

“My name is Little Boy,” said Little Boy in a terrified mumble.

The stranger shoved a foot into his face. “Do you have any idea whom you are speaking to? I am Big Boy, a renowned artisan in these parts. I am well known and respected for my mastery of the art of sculpting large animal figurines out of larger animal figurines, and whoever is writing this is pretty damn clever.”

Little Boy was offended – being vulnerable to most things – by Big Boy’s condescending tone, but he had an idea. He could work with Big Boy, honing his skills and creating a name for himself in a field he loved so much. He could have a job, like Mr. Fat Man had suggested. This could be the rest of his life; this could be what he was meant to do.

“You know,” he said to the closest friend he had ever known, “I make small animal figurines out of smaller animal figurines.”

“That is a useless and disgusting hobby that can never be practical in any way,” Big Boy told him. Little Boy drew a breath and sighed, for, deep down, he knew this to be true. “Now, I have customers to attend to.” He fired a thin rocket of snot from his nostril and stepped through the doorway of what Little Boy presumed to be his workshop – a large, gothic structure composed entirely of columns and arches. Little Boy followed, completely selfish and forever disrespectful toward others’ privacy.

Inside of the magnificent complex were animal figurines of infinite shapes and sizes: ferrets, mules, infantile pandas; Little Boy was in a sort of sick, unnatural heaven, surrounded by the expressionless faces of porcelain and stoicism. He stared at the shelves and shelves of what he had built his life upon. He saw that Big Boy was tending to some of his customers, his back turned. Little Boy looked back to the figurines; they were tempting him with promises of companionship and love, and he could not resist. He reached out his sticky, thieving fingers and grasped as many of the smaller figurines as he could, then rushing clumsily out the doorway.

He sped directly into an authoritative-looking officer of the law standing just outside who demanded the objects. “Dirty, pilfering mongrel,” he said, delivering a swift backhand to Little Boy’s face. He was upset, obviously outclassed by the man in blue, but was not surprised that the officer had acted in such a way. He was, after all, worthless nearly to the point of subhumanity.

Thirty years later, Little Boy nearly died due to overexposure to cesium radiation.

It was pretty close.

[Vio Milanor 28]

What a particularly lovely story.

[Teto 2609]

This made my entire life and everything I can't see behind the walls that have no real effect on my life at all

[Max 10]

Yes. <3

[Sahaqiel 1232]

o ganny

[Fierce Muffin 490]

Ya know, I never... wanted to be a killer robot...

All I ever... wanted to do was... carve wooden reindeer.

(Great story, by the way, you never disappoint, Ganny.)

[Aethix 129]

Great story. Sounds like something Douglas Adams would have written.

[Shadowknight 54]

I enjoyed it, I will not lie.

[pheonix561 2080]

I think I remember you talking about writing a story with name schemes such as these a while ago. Good result.