Jamie Mullins
A LITTLE BOY comes to play when father isn’t around. He knows how to slide down the bannister in a way that doesn’t hurt when you reach the lower landing. He shows me, and we laugh for hours.
Mother never minds when he visits, just busies herself rearranging flowers in a vase. She tells me not to track mud in. Father won’t like it. Father hardly likes anything. I think it, and the boy agrees. We keep secrets like this, where I think them, and he agrees. We swipe flowers from the table where Mother’s left the imperfect cuttings, him with a thistle, me with a daffodil. Both missing petals, both ours.
The little boy doesn’t have a name, so I give him mine. He makes all sorts of noise with me, out in the woods behind the cotter’s house, down the lane where the rubble meets dirt. He shrieks and hollers, teaches me bird calls; we trill and sing and squawk like hairless, flightless predators, darting over the rocks and between bushes like the prey we intend to find. Mother will have the woman who mends my clothes pick brambles from my hair, later. I tell her there aren’t any, I’m careful, I don’t play in the brambles. All mother ever touches these days are stiff green stems, how would she know what a bramble looks like?
The little boy doesn’t seem to grow like I do. He always wears the same shirts, and when they get dirty, he strips them off, runs them under the water in the bathroom sink or simply abandons them, letting the sun freckle his skin. I get taller, my shirts acquire buttons, my trousers shorten over lengthening legs, but he stays small, wide-eyed, mouth brimming with grins I keep forgetting to match. I keep it to myself, this observation. I don’t want to make him cross.
Once, when the boy was upset, not by something I did, mind, but by something Father did, Father said, one of his maelstroms as Mother calls them, I can’t remember…It was then that I saw him angry, saw that ever-present smile fade, curl inward like a frightened cat, his eyes shrinking with it, retreating to the back of his skull, showing the empty undersides of their usual cavern. His skin darkened, the sun behind a cloud, and I don’t remember what he did or said to Father, but it made me very afraid. I didn’t watch, coward and child as I was, but after that, Father wasn’t one to do or say much around us. Father avoided my shadow, and I his stormy attitudes. Mother didn’t seem to mind.
Jamie Mullins is happy to report that he is alive and drawing breath. He enjoys writing, graphic design, and voice acting, and when he is not working at his usual workplace, he can be found dual wielding his interests or staring at his cat for long hours. He is an honours graduate of English and Scottish History from the University of Dundee, where he mostly wrote about queerness, Calvinism, and abandoned buildings. Mostly, Jamie is excited to continue pursuing creative collaboration with his fellow whimsical earth dwellers.
