The Boy with no feelings (Short Story)

[This story is not complete. If you think it should be, comment below]

If you have never experienced some sort of tragedy in your life, I wonder if you have ever lived. Every heart beat, is a heart ache. Every breath is a struggle for oxygen. Every quenching, becomes thirst in the pool of tears that floods under the drafty gap that sits between the closed door and the floor in my room. I believe that every night, after I have fallen asleep, my parents go to the door and sop up what they can with tea towels, I see their shadow in the light that enters through that draft. Every night, I wonder why they bother. And every night I am haunted by the same reality: they don’t bother, because their dead.

Inevitably, every night, I have to come to terms with this, the shadow that appears in the faint light is my brother: the boy with no name. To be honest, he and I are all we’ve got and yet I never got him. Perhaps it was my parents’ fault. It was a hard pregnancy for my Mom. By the end of nine months, they obviously couldn’t be bothered naming him and when they died, he was left nameless. Perhaps they don’t think he deserved a name.

The boy with no name has no feelings. I see him sometimes, sometimes it is more than a shadow. I’ve never seen him smile. When he was a baby, he was so full of smiles. But they were lost on me. Often the neighbour, Cameron, would just come over and babysit. When she moved house, he was old enough to take care of himself. I buy the groceries and sometimes, he will pull out the vacuum cleaner. However, he will only go into the master bedroom and vacuum, sometimes he makes it out into the hallway before the school bus honks its horn and he picks up his school bag and leaves. He does this at least twice a week, leaving the vacuum outside and often times I will finish up. I don’t really mind, it’s kind of soothing.

One day, the school bus didn’t honk its horn. And so the boy with now name just kept vacuuming. Like a robot, he was programmed to respond to the loud horn: the call of the yellow whale which swallows kids and spits them out at school. Inevitably, around 8:15, I assumed I would hear the call and then the sound of silence as the boy with no name made his way to the door. Around 8:30, I heard the vacuum cleaner drift from the master bedroom further away from my bedroom adjacent. It was curious. He had finished the hallway and was moving into the living room. I felt kind of sorry for him - a dog with no master calling. I let him continue.

Finally, around 9:07 (I know, because I checked the time), the whirring stopped. He picked up his bag and went out the front door. I wandered into the living room and evidence of vacuum lines could be traced all through the house. The whole house has been vacuumed. Just as it had always been. But never solely by him, it was mostly by me.

The door closed at around 4:00 o’clock that afternoon and the boy with no name put down his bag by the front door and took the vacuum cleaner outside. Perhaps it was an obsession. I peeked out the window, overrun by curiosity. He walked across the street. Knocked on the door and went inside to Mrs Finebretter’s home. I shrugged, went back to my room and allowed the dark silence - achieved by my blackout curtains - to lull me to sleep. And once again, the shadow of the boy appeared in the gap’s light. The hallway light went off and I assumed my resting state once again. A dry sleep tonight: no tears.

The next morning, no vacuuming. No anything. I woke up to a sound I had never heard before. The school bus. Usually the boy would be at his morning task by now. But he wasn’t. I jumped out of bed, scared by the interrupted routine. I looked, for the first time in my life, into the bedroom of my brother. His absence had amazing effects: I cared little, and yet all too much.

I went outside and squinted in the outstanding light of the sun. The bright yellow school bus. The vibrant, green trees in the adjacent gardens. The roses and their leaves like emeralds. The street was concrete gray, but the quartz reflected the sunlight. The driver in the bus looked confused, that is, when I finally could get a good look at him. It was a mixture of ​who are you? , ​where is the boy from that house? ​and ​why are you squinting?

I went over to the bus driver and stumbled over my words. ​Haven’t you seen a little boy? ​I asked. Unfortunately, he hadn’t and he apologised but he ​had to complete his route. I continued walking one direction as he drove another. Sometimes, you get that weird feeling in the back of your neck, where you feel you are being watched. Sometimes, I list all the possible scenarios of things that could go wrong and, inevitably, I become quite paranoid. Most of the time I just shake it off. ​You’re simply not used to being outside, you’re scared. ​ There are other times when I feel like I have made a mistake and wish I hadn’t. This was one of those times.