❝normalcy | els & mal
“That's how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. That's how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. That's how I became the boy who wouldn't save a friend. That's how I became the boy who couldn't love the girl.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms
Marfan’s syndrome, he remembered his mother explaining to him once when he was younger, perhaps around the age of six or eight, that was one of the things that made him extraordinary and he had called it Martians’ syndrome exhibiting a glint of a deeper bitterness which would plague him his entire life. It had been very apparent from an early age, when he towered over his classmates all gangly and bone sharp, that Elias was never going to fit in; his appearance would never grant him assimilation among the ranks of normalcy and no amount of parental soothing or affection could ever compensate for that fact. He had been designed to be a creature of self-loathing, a solitary specter damned to the confines of his own torturous intellect with an early dissolving hope for anything greater. Being a victim was easy because he had been born as one. Even now, swaddled in the safety of his own malevolent ability, he could easily invoke the ghosts of his past with an assured shuddering remembrance of his decade of suffering. Broken, burned, spit on, come on, kicked; bathed in soft sprays of his own blood, painted in sunset shades of bruises, and always the silence. Like the supposed witches which had come before him, he too was no stranger to false prosecution, forever charged with imagined crimes he could never commit.
Was this the end or only the beginning? A question that raced ever through his nightmares.
Elias sat hunched over the table in the grand dining room, his almost curved spine pressing its lumpy, skeletal ridges like tiny skyscrapers, against the strained fabric of his sagging sweat shirt while he ruthlessly appraised the immaculate division of playing cards stretched out before him. Abnormally slender, alien-esque fingers reached forward to turn one bicycle card and expose the sallow, translucent and veiny underbelly of a fragile wrist, the contrasting structures scarcely seeming related by any stretch of the imagination. “Damn.” The boy hissed to himself in a hushed whisper while he reached forward to retract his still burning cigarette from the lip of a nearby ashtray and take a lengthy, therapeutic drag; a cup of sweet smelling black coffee rested just beyond the pointed hook of his right elbow, sending its own earthy scented plumes of smog into the atmosphere. Cards had always been one of his favorite archaic pastimes; they required intense focus yet little thought and in the absence of other’s they were an excellent distraction.
"The kid was cut in half Arnie, they had to scrape his legs up with a shovel."
"Well, isn't that what you're supposed to do with shit? Scrape it up with a little shovel?"
Dialogue echoed loudly from the adjacent tv room, where someone was watching a horror movie in honor of Halloween, normally this invasion of other’s personal space and intimacy would have grated on Elias’s nerves, but this evening he felt unusual – almost too restless to concentrate on such trivialities and tuned it out, keeping his ears open solely for more interesting sounds. Sounds which preceded peculiar possibilities.