A Study Of Truths

• Karanon Umbalisyyrr, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2022

It’s a quiet moment in the kitchen awashed in grey-blues of stormcloud veils, the chill of wet gales, the percussion of gently quaking windows. A blackout, a power outage and morning sun shuttered by curtains of rain. There’s a small candle on the table and a question between two of them.

“Would it be so bad to think you deserved better?” It’s a question asked before, a rhetoric with a predictable response, a riddle already answered. Regardless, Erik waits for his response from across the table, arms folded and expectant.

He doesn’t meet Erik’s eyes, plucking at fingers and picking at the warped latticework of silvery scars. Yes, he’d said the month before and the month preceding that. It’s just seeking confirmation at this point, seeing the standstill he’d slowed down to. The admission feels shameful because it’s not what Erik wants to hear, but saying otherwise is a lie just as equally shameful.

Yes, he’d say again, about to say again, but he accidentally, intentionally, catches Erik’s eye. Thoroughly drenched in dusky dimness despite the morning, in the haze of chill rain and—

He’s young again, lead astray from the beaten path in the forest like all adventurous children have been before. He fancies himself an explorer, a runaway, an escapee.

He’s shivering in the lingering rain of a passed storm, sky still dim and heavy. But he walks further into the trees, at ease with his abandon and a confidence that no one will come looking for him in the woods. No one comes looking for a child that only knows how to bare teeth instead of smile, cry instead of laugh. It’s as much of a reassurance as it is condemnation.

He accidentally, intentionally, catches his wobbly reflection’s eye in a rippling creek. It’s a moment awashed in grey-blues of stormcloud veils.

There are a lot of things he wanted— still wants, and things he thinks he must find himself. There are things he’d long accepted to be impossible and cannot be given. Because if love was so easily relinquished to the children of the playground while he’d been relegated to wander alone in the woods with the bite of winds, there must be something wholly wrong and defective about him. If the soft sting of rain is more gentle than hands of flesh and blood, if there’s no antidote to his defects, does it not mean there’s a reason, a justification to withhold love? Does it not mean—

And Erik reaches out towards him, hand splayed open but not in a slap. It’s an invitation to comfort.

He stares, doesn’t accept it, breaths shallow and fast but always quiet. He looks down at his hands again, curled into fists. Scars shiny in the candle light, scars from scrapes and scratches during lone adventures and escapades. Scars from the occupational hazards of being an unwanted interloper.

He breathes, once, twice.

“No,” Ørlend says, and it feels like confession, it feels like relief, it feels like blasphemy. “No, it isn’t.”