To Move Righteously and Without Hate

Picture a teenage boy with a teenage boy’s complexion, which is to say not great. He wears a thick pair of glasses on a giant head, made uglier by a gap-toothed smile. Lots of people will say he looks like Shrek when the movie comes out, which he will accept with good humor. Other people tell him that he has a thousand-yard stare, to which he firmly insists they don’t know what they’re talking about.

It’s a lie he will insist upon for years.

He carries a sense of darkness that he knows he’s supposed to keep secret. It’s a feeling like the breath of the Nothing from the Neverending Story on the back of his neck. A feeling like there’s some terrible, beastly unknown fact about the world standing right behind him, which if confronted would logically demand the end of existence. Something so terrible a man would rather lay down and die on the spot than acknowledge it directly.

The feeling makes him wildly punch the cement walls in the basement until his knuckles bleed. He has a stupid fantasy that one day he will make his bones stronger than rock if he does this enough. Nobody cares that his knuckles are covered in scabs that bleed all the time, or that his fingers click when he makes a fist. It’s a teenage boy thing. A rite of passage where he has to try to be more tough than sensible. Like everyone else who has stared into the mouth of hell, the boy is going about the indirect business of pretending life has any meaning and everyone knows he has to figure it out for himself.

Give this boy the awkwardness of great height attained in youth but only half the muscle a man requires for his dignity. Place in his mind an embarrassing and precocious intellect unpruned by peers of equal ability. Bolt on a sense that he doesn’t belong anywhere so that he reads too many Fantasy novels and thinks there’s something noble about deciding he’s too good for the world as it is, and that somehow by thinking this he has become too good for the world in truth.

For the setting, imagine a living room in a run-down house in the kind of neighborhood that floods every year. A third divorce kind of house. For the time, imagine that it’s beyond the middle of