Like a Hunger
By Evan James Sheldon
The boy walks to the ice cream truck while all the other children run. He likes to let them make their choices out of breath and in haste, without deliberation, and then watch the regret spread across their features as he takes his time and makes the perfect choice. It is an evil game, he knows, but he is small and children are not always kind to small things. A little revenge can still be revenge.
When he arrives at the truck, the other children are already sticky with their poor decisions. The boy scans the menu, reading every item, debating. He makes his choice and moves to the window. The ice cream man is waiting.
The ice cream man’s head is a birdcage, an old rusted cage, the kind that the boy’s mom might buy and use as a decoration, filled with candles she never burns. A small bat, so small that it almost doesn’t look real, hangs upside down from the top of the cage and a sugar glider is curled up, sleeping at its base on a newspaper littered with unrecognizable, half-eaten fruit. Kid. You going to just stand there? What do you want?
The boy remembers himself and stammers out an order. Pocket rock. I mean Rocket Pop. The other kids laugh as he hands over the money and his neck burns. He knows that he will be called some version of pocket rock for the next few weeks. The ice cream man doesn’t even notice what he’s done, how in one interaction, he has shoved the boy back down and away from the other kids. Even if the boy doesn’t want to spend time with them, he wants them to want to spend time with him. And that is now ruined.
The boy takes his Rocket Pop, already dripping patriotic colors down his hand because of the heat, and he goes back to into the gulley behind his house. No one ever goes out among the boxelders and chokecherries and he eats his popsicle alone among the trees and shrubs, replaying the moment over and over in his head. He plays out what he would have said, what he should have said. Made a joke about the sugar glider, maybe, though he doesn’t know what that would be. Said something about bat shit for brains, anything would have been better than pocket rock. Part of the popsicle sloughs off onto his shirt and then into the dirt. He bites down hard on the popsicle stick and then snaps it off, splintering just beyond his lips.
But his lips aren’t lips. His mouth isn’t a mouth. He reaches up and feels the thin metal bars curving gracefully to meet at the top of his head. And as his fingers trace the cage on his shoulders, he realizes the metal isn’t as disconcerting as the spaces between. He knows it is there and feels around until he finds the little gate, and then thrusts his arm in, rummaging around in the cage hoping to find something and terrified at the same time that he might. But it is empty.
Once, his mother took him on a hike and they picked red foxgloves and blue columbines and while they were picking the flowers, they saw a hummingbird of the purest white and shiny like sugar. It flitted about sucking what nectar it could. The boy tried to catch it, and it didn’t fly away, but his mother caught his arm and shook her head, and then the hummingbird buzzed off.
The boy thinks that if he were to catch such a beautiful bird, then the other kids wouldn’t laugh. He could keep it in his cage, and while a part of him is sad at the thought, another more pressing need, like a hunger, rises up and he sets off to catch the hummingbird.
He finds some drab tiny birds, and spots one, maybe a golden eagle, so large and menacing high up on a lodgepole pine that he pretends he doesn’t see it and moves on. Now that he’s looking, there are birds everywhere, and while many are beautiful none are the hummingbird he’s searching for.
After a while, he sits down on a stump, pulls out his pocketknife, and stabs and pricks the wood over and over, not making a pattern intentionally, but unsurprised to see one arise. He startles at a voice to his left and his grip tightens on the knife. I’ve been watching you and you’re going about this all wrong. Here.
It is a boy about his height, maybe even smaller, though instead of a cage for head, a beehive sits on his shoulders. And he’s holding another beehive out at arm’s length. It buzzes with an inner violence and is at once both so still and tremulous. The bees fly around and around and together they almost sound like a hummingbird, only greater, wilder somehow.
The boy doesn’t consider it, such is his need, and he takes the beehive from the buzzy-headed boy and shoves it down over his own cage, destroying most of its interior, and covering up those slick metal bars and emptiness. The bees fly at his arms and hands and sting him. It hurts, but he doesn't care, and he delights in the fact that from this moment on anyone who comes near him will need to be careful.
The boys head off up the gulley together, stepping on larger and larger fallen branches that crack louder and louder beneath their weight. Dry earth slopes away from them on both sides. You know, the smaller boy says, they say that this was once a river but that’s not true. A man fought a giant here and they shook up the ground.
Yes, says the boy with Rocket Pop stain. That must be true. And they begin to search for giant bones among the fallen trees and brush.
THE END