elliot fletcher.
I SHUT MY EYES AND ALL THE WORLD DROPS DEAD / I THINK I MADE YOU UP INSIDE MY HEAD
Elliot was six when he began to entertain the notion of having an imaginary friend.
The process of growing up felt slow and tedious. The discomfiting feeling of being too small for the world he was born in never seemed to abate. Tables and bookshelves were always too high up, and he always had to crane his neck up to look at anything or anyone worth looking at.
Everything felt perpetually out of reach.
His parents did too, but in a different way. At dinner, they sat themselves at the farthest ends of north and south. Elliot was always perched between them, balancing the knife edge tensions on the tips of his fingers like a fulcrum.
He watched his parents with solemn eyes. His father's smiles were a careful construct, genial and politely interested. His mother's sharp, precise movements reminded him of the inane puppet show one of the nannies had taken him to last month. When his father mentioned, tone offhand, an upcoming business trip that would take him away for a month, her knife scraped over her plate with a screech. His father politely ignored it.
He watched and wondered why no one ever said what they meant, or meant what they said. The world became shaded in, gained facets. Now he had to learn to navigate the nebulous realm of complex adult emotions. White lies with shrivelled, blackened edges.
-
His parents were worried about him, he knew. They worried about his quietness, his reserved manner around others his age. They thought he was shy.
He wasn't.
The idea of other children his age was quite novel, right up until he'd been introduced to one. He'd hoped to be able to quickly wash his hands of the entire concept, but his parents had insisted he spend time with his cousin, who toddled around on clumsy feet and pressed sticky fingers into all his books.
He ignored her as best he could, retreating into a corner and eyeing his cousin balefully over the top of a book.
His cousin grew as rapidly bored of Elliot as he did of her, which suited him fine. He was left blessed alone, and wasn't disturbed for a long time, until he heard her start chattering again.
Elliot looked up. His cousin poured tea, presumably, and offered it to the blank space next to her, still nattering away. Elliot furrowed his brow, and tried to understand before he asked, "What are you doing?"
She gave him a pitying look. "Having a tea party."
"With who?" He asked, baffled. "Who are you talking to?"
"Charlotte," she replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "I'm playing with her, since you won't play with me."
He narrowed his eyes at her. "There's no one there," he said flatly.
She rolls her eyes. "Don't be stupid. She's
my imaginary friend. She only likes to talk to
me."
Elliot went quiet, and considered.
-
That night, Elliot wondered if there was something to the idea of an imaginary friend. The possible benefit of having one, he thought, was that if it came from his own mind, then at least he wouldn't have to worry about it badgering him with stupid questions or messing up the careful order of his books.
He closed his eyes and concentrated. He sketched out the shape of a boy, a little older than him. He named him Adam. He decided, randomly, that his father owned a ranch in Piney Woods. Adam was the middle child of three, was missing one of his front teeth and had knees that were perpetually scraped and dirty.
Adam lasted half a day before Elliot dismissed him. They'd had nothing in common, and the lisp resulting from his missing tooth had driven Elliot to distraction.
After Adam was Cassandra. A woman, and a pirate queen. She had dusky skin, and bright bits of gold embedded in her nose and under her lip. She had kohl rimmed eyes and laughed a lot, and spent most of her time teasing him and reading over his shoulder when he was supposed to be studying.
The attempt was better, this time around, but there were quiet moments when she sat by the window in the morning, staring down at the long driveway as his father left to work. The sad, solemn look lurking in her eyes reminded him of his mother.
In the end, he let her go too, and pulled the silence around him like a shroud.
-
One day, when he was studying, something slammed into his window.
He looked up just in time to see a small, feathery shape roll off the ledge and into the gardens.
Elliot went to investigate. It took an hour of digging through the shrubs on his hands and knees before he found it, small, bright and still.
For a moment, he wasn't sure if the bright red colouring was its feathers, or if it was blood. But then he saw the wetness trickling from its beak, and its eyes, and from where its body had ruptured from the impact against the window.
The pink of its entrails were unspooling from its body cavity, and its head was twisted around at an unnatural angle—but Elliot still thought it was rather pretty. Its feathers were fine things, with the careful constellation of black dotting its wings, and the stark stripe of red painting its cheeks.
Elliot started to reach out to touch it when a long shadow fell over him.
"What are you doing, Elliot?" His father asked.
Elliot blinked up at his father, before returning his steady gaze back to the bird in front of him. His first encounter with death.
"It's pretty," he said simply, and shrugged.
That was apparently all the answer his father needed. He nodded, and helped Elliot bury the bird. He took him inside to wash his hands, and the next day, gave him an encyclopedia about various bird species.
For the first time, his interest quickened in a way he couldn't explain. He read the book from cover to cover, and discovered that his dead friend had been a Northern Flicker, a member of the woodpecker family.
He learned other things too. That there were birds that ate rotting flesh, that there were smaller birds who hunted larger prey by driving them onto spikes, impaling them. There were even some birds that were blind and hunted by smell.
But somehow his mind always seemed to turn back towards that first bird as inevitably as a compass pointed north. He remembered the shape of it starkly—shattered, feathers mangled, but still fascinating.
He sat in his room, alone and in the dark. He stared at the blank space in the middle of the room, at the way the air seemed to quiver as if begging him to try again.
Creation took longer this time. Whatever lurked beyond the amorphous dark didn't seem to want to come as easily as Adam and Cassandra had. A shape began to form, and Elliot tamped down on the urge to fill it with details. He thought that had been where he'd failed, before. If he left it open, perhaps something would pour into it like a decanter.
He let his mind drift, and thought of feathers, speckled and red. He thought of the way birds canted their heads, the way their eyes would lock onto something with eerie focus. He thought of blood, thought of death and its sickly sweet smell, fermenting in the blistering high noon heat.
With a complete and utter lack of surprise, Elliot watched as all the shadows in the room were dragged away from their objects, as though their tethers had been cut. They coalesced at the centre of the room, and slowly, something began to burble beneath the velvety dark, gathering shape.
Elliot crawled forward, his knees dragging against the rug. When he was an arm's length away, he sat on his haunches to watch as the darkness solidified.
It shifted, as though restless. As it moved, Elliot heard a susurrus sound, like feathers and a hundred different voices sighing.
There was a long moment before one of its eyes cracked open a sliver. It had uncanny yellow irises. One eye, and then two. They opened and fluttered, pupils expanding and contracting, before they narrowed their focus on him with eerie intensity.
He gazed steadily back. "Hello. My name is Elliot."
He waited. When no reply seemed forthcoming, he stood and canted his head. "I made you," he said seriously. "You're mine. Meant for me."
He took two steps back and beckoned. "Come out of the shadows, now. I have something to show you."
