Darren

• Ursula Brixton, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2004

He is huddled now, as a foetus in its womb, inside the phone box in the carpark next to the beach. The needle that is held, without force, to his arm, his umbilical cord. And for a moment, before plunging these chemicals into his stream, he thinks of Darren. That sweet old man who'd hauled him in off his doorstep. Who had made him porridge and who had left him, a junkie kid, trustingly among his precious things while went to work at his job. He smiles as he thinks of Darren, his quaint ways, his unjudging nature. Then he laughs, because it seems funny to him that every person he's ever cared for, he has ended up feeling nothing for. Countless relations with mean people had painfully carved him into this state of indifference, to the point where now he can turn away from something awful and scarring, unaffected.
For a fleeting second he thinks that maybe he's changed, and he doesn't even know it. That maybe if he stopped shying away from people who he found interesting or attractive he'd find someone to truly love and it would feel so good, that the prospect of waking up in the morning and being able to watch them suffer with a detached kind of empathy - the way you do when you see baby deer killed and ravaged by lions on the television set - wouldn't seem so awful and daunting in perspective.
He thinks that perhaps it would have been this way with Darren, but he could never stand to hate him, so he guesses that perhaps it's better that he'll never get the chance. He remembered that morning when he'd said that it was actually really funny, and Darren had stared at him blankly. They'd been taking about his scar. More of a tattoo really. The one his mother burned onto the inside of his wrist with a hot piece of wire when he was a little boy. It was in the crude shape of a butterfly. He'd told Darren that he couldn't remember it hurting.
Darren had stared at him stony faced and told him that his mother was crazy. He could remember being slightly offended at the time, but now he thinks that it's probably true, and that in a kind of deranged way, it's funny.
He ponders all of this, his cheek pressed against the dark blue mesh in the bottom half of the phone booth's wall, looking at his scar. Bathed in the dull fluorescence, spliced by his own self-destructive tracks it looks hideously ugly and deformed. His body is aching, weary from abuse that is inflicted on him by those who support his debilitating ways. He closes his eyes because he is sick of looking at all the affronting, grotesque things that are around him.
In the morning someone who is walking past sees him slumped, his scarred arm extending out over his knees, and rings someone who they think can fix it.
The ambulance men come and drag him away from the comfort and shelter of his phone box, he is born. The needle is dropped into a zip lock bag and placed in a sterile bin, his discarded umbilical cord. But there is no mother to weep for her stillborn child.