Ghost Bats Make Excellent Children

L

Lame

Guest
Original poster
The sun peered over the horizon, painting the sky in brilliant hues as it brought on a new day. It pierced through the curtains of Joseph’s bedroom window but brought him no joy. It simply signified he was a day closer to murdering his own creation. He’d hardly slept a wink but instead lay there staring at the blank roof, torturing himself with question after question. What could I have done differently? What can I do? Is there any point?

Joseph looked somewhat how he felt. He had constant bags under his eyes and his eyes, once a bright, intelligent green, seemed dulled and glassy. He seemed undeniably older than he actually was. He didn’t stand out in any particular regard. He was of an average height and had an average build, though he was perhaps a bit too skinny due to oft neglected meals. His hair was still thick and brown, though it was peppered with silver here and there. Other men who were less fortunate at retaining their hair cursed him. He kept himself well shaven except on weekends when he didn’t have to bother.

An alarm suddenly blared on his bedside table. “Time to get up,” he mumbled to himself, as he sat up and silenced the alarm clock. He’d often talk to himself while at home to make up for the silence, try to make the place seem just a little bit less empty. He still lived in the same place he and his wife had bought before they divorced. It had been years since she’d moved back across the country yet he still felt the void she’d left behind. It was like a ghost followed him around the house, whispering into his ear what he once had and then foolishly lost.

He went about his usual morning routine, it was all a bit of an uninteresting blur until he got to work. At work there was the added thrill of having to dodge conversations with co-workers but most of them didn’t bother anymore. They’d taken the hint that he didn’t want to suffer listening to how they’d recently ‘invested’ in a boat and how much of a bitch their mother-in-law was this weekend. Wasn’t there a point where they’d get too old for such menial chatter? Joseph often felt like an outsider around fellow humans these days. Their mannerisms all seemed so absurd.

Thankfully, he made it to his office without being disturbed but he could only stay a moment before he had go back out through the gauntlet. The mornings were a treacherous time out there since there was a steady trickle of other staff coming in. Of course, he wouldn’t let his work suffer simply because of his antisocial tendencies. Once he’d grabbed his file he headed back out and threaded his way through the facility to where his ‘magnum opus’ lay.

The closer he got, the greater the guilty knot grew in his stomach. He’d been trying to think of the child as an experiment again lately since his expiry date was coming up. It made Joseph realise how much he used him as a surrogate child in place of his own. He tried to rationalise the relationship as a bad one, it was like he was merely plugging up the hole in his heart rather than trying to repair it but perhaps that was the best he could ever hope to do? To merely cover the loss up? It certainly didn’t feel like there was any possible way to fix himself at this point, he’d let the wound fester for too long and now it had become a scar that could not be removed.

He paused in front of the door to the child’s room and tried to prepare himself. He wondered if the child had managed to somehow see through his act and realised something was wrong. He was still young, though, so surely not. At least, that’s what Joseph hoped. He didn’t want to have to lie to the kid on top of everything else. He mustered himself together and opened the door (after unlocking it, of course).

Good morning,” he said, as he entered the room with a soft, slightly forced smile. The room’s walls and floor were a bare white like the rest of the facility. Unlike the others, however, this room was decorated like a child’s bedroom. A cot lay in the corner of the room, bolted to the ground. Elsewhere in the room there also lay several toys, some paper and coloured pencils. As per requested, there was no food within the room this morning. “There’s a few things I need to check before you can have breakfast, okay?

[ Am I doing the whole colouring speech thing right? It looks nicer, right? ]
 
Few things were so comforting as the faint whirr of the overhead ceiling lights coming on to signify it was daytime and therefore time to wake up. Perhaps the stuffed animal he slept with was of near equal merit- it offered comfort and warmth at night in a place where there was none- but nothing else matched it like the lights coming on every morning. It meant three very important things for Vladislav; tests, food, and Joseph. It was routine. It was all he knew. And it was all he would know for as long as he lived.

Wake up.
See Joseph.
Test.
Eat.
Play.
See Joseph.
Eat.
Sleep.
Test.
Play.
See Joseph.
Eat.
Bathe.
Sleep.

Repeat.

Some days, there were no tests. No measurements, no probes, no shining lights in his eyes or his mouth or his ears. No blood samples, no waste samples. Nothing. Those days were few and in between. They disrupted the routine and the boy wasn't sure if a break in the monotony was a good thing or not. It was worrisome, on some level. But it wasn't his place to worry. And he tried not to, he really did. But it was hard not to worry and let negative thoughts fester when there was little to nothing else to do.

He had caregivers, other than Joseph, who would sometimes come into his room and sit with him. A few were nice and would read books and play with him. Others, not so much. But Vlad considered himself lucky that there weren't so many bad sitters as there were good ones. Of course none of them were as jovial or comforting as he would've liked, but any attention was better than none, and the boy took all the attention he could get when he could get it. And so he looked forward to the lights coming on every morning.

He'd woke up early enough, about an hour before the lights were scheduled to turn on. During that time, he drew at the table in the corner of the room opposite of his cot. His eyesight was markedly better than that of the humans who surrounded him on a daily basis, so he could afford to play in the dark, even before the lights were on. Still, in the darkness, it was hard to distinguish the colors that he could see, and it made for a sloppy drawing that didn't account at all for the lack of coordination in his hands.

He'd drawn himself standing next to Joseph, holding the man's hand. They usually felt cold, but he liked to think that if he held them long enough, they'd feel warm; like when he held his own hands together. The boy was still sitting at his table when the older man entered the room. He was finishing his drawing, adding little details that he'd missed at first, like Joseph's lab coat, which was just a series of lines meant to resemble a rectangle over the man's disfigured stick body. He drew the veins in his wings and the little ones in his ears where they were the thinnest. None of it looked good at all, but he was proud of it, and he wanted to show the scientist what he'd worked on all morning.

Vlad's massive ears atop his head twitched and his scrunched in little face lit up when Joseph spoke to him. Clumsily, he hopped out of his chair and clambered over towards the man, showing off his picture proudly in his misshapen hands with fingers that were too long and too thin for as small as the rest of him was. Clawed feet clacked against the tile with every step he took, but he'd long since perfected the art of walking on it without slipping or scratching it. "Morning! Look! Look what I made! It'th uth! Do you like it?" He pointed to himself- a blobby gray figure with beady eyes and massive ears atop its head. There were crudely drawn wings that took up a good portion of the background, obviously meant to be the ones on his back that he often kept wrapped up and held tight against him to keep out of the way. Then he pointed to the figure next to him with yellow skin and a mop of unruly blue squiggles on its head. Blue and brown were one in the same for him- he couldn't tell the difference to know it was wrong.

"Ith there a big tetht today? Are you taking blood? I don't like the needleth. Can we uth the little oneth thith time? The big oneth hurt really bad." He didn't mind at all that he had to wait to eat, even though he was a bit hungry. This was routine. And he liked the routine. It was safe. It was reassuring. "It'th not going to take long, ith it?"

((It looks wonderful. Sorry if the orange is hard on your eyes. I like it.