煙々羅

[wightknight]

They say it’s easier to deal with things when you write stuff down.

I don’t know about that, but it’s pretty obvious the real reason we’re doing this is so they can get us to sit quiet for an hour. They don’t know what to do with us otherwise. These ‘counselors’ – It’s like all it takes to do the job is to talk to kids like they’re five. Yeah, we know what it means to die. Saint isn’t in a better place or with his family or whatever else they want to call it. He fell. He burned. He died. That’s it. There’s nothing wrong with saying things the way they are.  Heaven or no heaven, Saint’s dead.

There’s nothing I want to say here, but you know what? They’re right. Someone’s gotta write the story down. Not to make our feelings all better, but just because it has to be said before we forget.  They talked to us once about repressment and not doing it, but who are they kidding? No one wants to remember what happened. No one wants to think about it. I don’t even know if anyone else really knows what happened that night.

So it’s gonna be me. I’ll write it.  I owe him that much.

Where do I start with a story like this?  From the beginning, yeah, I know, but who knows when the beginning was for Saint? I’m just gonna go back. Way back, before any of the trouble really started. Back when we first became friends.

So here.  This is the story of Sylvester Penbleman, recently deceased, known to us as the Saint, or at least a better saint than whoever had the name in the first place.  It’s a story that starts with a fire, ends with a fire, and features a whole lot of fire in between.

 -----------------

When I was eight years old, Sylvester Penbleman moved into the house across the street.  His parents were youth workers.  He was an only child.  It took a while before I decided to introduce myself to the new kid, and I remember the first thing he ever said to me was: “Have you accepted Jesus into your life?”  Just like that.  Kind of a pitchy tone, blinking at me like it was a totally normal thing to say. That should tell you the kind of kid he was.  I think I tried changing the subject a few times before I stuck a cookie in his face to get him to shut up about his Savior and God.

All the kids around the neighborhood decided pretty quick about him after that. Yeah, we waved and said ‘hi’ when we saw him, but for some reason, he always sat alone on the bus, he never came out when we played kickball in the field, and if he did play, he was always last pick. All those stupid little things kids do, you know?

Like everyone else, I forgot he existed by high school. I was fourteen. I was way too cool to be friends with the guy who brought his Bible to school every day. Even if I was OK with being a loser by association, he was the kind of guy who faded into the background and never came out. We didn’t dislike him so much as we didn’t even remember his name. There was just something about him. He’d dropped the Littlest Evangelist thing at that point, and he wasn’t nerdy or geeky or even really bad-looking; he just never made friends with anyone. Like he didn’t need friends. We weren’t sure how to deal with that when we were all so busy trying to win the popularity contest - or at least come out of school somewhere in the top half.  So we just ignored him.

That was how it was up until his house burned down.

It was late September.  1:00 in the morning.  Friday night.

I still remember the sirens. I heard them first in my dreams; the nukes were ten seconds from blowing up the White House when I jolted awake, but for some reason, the noise just kept on going. I thought I was still dreaming. Looking out the window and seeing the house all lit up, I remembering rolling over to go right back to sleep. See, this wasn’t the kind of thing that actually happened in real life. It was the kind of thing you saw on the news, happening to someone you didn’t know real far away, and you’d shake your head when they cried and say things to yourself like ‘how awful’ and you’d curl up all safe and cozy on your side of the TV. But it didn’t really happen.  It couldn’t happen.  Especially not to you.

It happened to Sylvester.  And in a way, it happened to me.  A house burning down; it's kinda life-changing for everyone involved.  I don't know why, but I took a second glance out the window as I was lying back down - and I saw him. Standing on our side of the street, staring at his house, looking miserable.  The decent thing to do would’ve been to go out and say how sorry I was and that kind of crap, but I didn’t go find him because I felt sorry for him. The only reason I crawled out of bed at all was because he wasn’t wearing anything but boxers. Yeah, stupid.  But I said I was still asleep, right? I just remember thinking, if he was gonna watch his house go up in smoke, he should at least be dressed. So I grabbed some pants and a shirt and I went out, still half-dreaming.

I woke up soon enough. There was the heat and the light, for one thing, but more than that… There was the look on his face.  It's stuck with me all this time. It was the kind of thing you don’t ever want to see in your life, the kind of thing you see in movies about wars and death and catastrophe. He didn’t even look at me, just took the pants and stared blankly.

He never did put them on. All the neighbors were out soon enough, and half the town was crowding around, screaming, throwing blankets, pulling us away, whatever. He wouldn’t budge. I didn’t feel right about leaving him then, so I didn’t, either. ...And then sometime in all this, he grabbed my hand real tight, and what else was there to do but let him? So it was just the two of us, holding on to each other in the middle of a bunch of clueless idiots who didn’t know what to do.  In the end, everyone just ended up standing there. Just… watched the house go down. Saint never spoke a word to me. He kept looking up at the sky like he couldn’t stand looking at the fire any more, and he prayed. Or maybe just gibbered. He closed his eyes and mumbled, “the smoke, the smoke, the smoke” over and over again.

About three in the morning, it died down, and by then, it was just me, my folks, and a few of the closer neighbors left to stare at what was left. I’d missed it somehow, but the firemen had gotten his family to the hospital, probably while herding us out of the way, pushing us back away from the house into the fields nearby. Even then, he wouldn’t let go of me, so we just asked if he wanted to stay the night with us since there was nothing wrong with him. I was too tired to think about how lucky he’d been, that he’d gotten out so quick. I just wondered if he’d ever let go.

...We both wanted to shower.  He let go.  Then he took the bed. I had the floor. We didn’t sleep. He cried, and shuddered under my blankets when he was all out of tears. I stared at the ceiling and wondered if I was supposed to say anything. And I wondered, too, what it would feel like to lose everything I had in one go.

About dawn, he finally croaked something out. Asked me my name. I had to ask for his, too.

“Sylvester,” he said. I couldn’t help myself.

“Like the cat?”

“Like the saint.”

He said it like it was so obvious that I couldn’t help but laugh. Dumb thing to do, but thinking about Saint Sylvester the Cat after everything that had just happened was hilarious. I don’t know what I’d have done if he hadn’t started laughing, too.

And that’s how he became Sylvester the Saint. Sometimes Cat, but usually Saint.