The coarse concoction of decaying leaves and cold gravel were all that supported the polished clogs of the shivering child. She let the sleeves of her gray fur coat hang limply over the tiny clenched hands that struggled to fight off the creeping chill of September frost, and shrugged her shoulders to cover her exposed neck. Her head tilted down, releasing renegade strands of sandy, windblown hair, which refused to conform to her mother’s well-crafted ponytail, falling limply past her forehead and tickling her pale cheeks. The black stockings she wore were partially covered with propriety by a plaid skirt adorned with railroad tracks of blue, black, and white.

The figures that she hid from were not unfamiliar to her. She had been in their cold company for twenty dreary seasons, each one changing to reveal evermore the pale, rubbery features of her paternal overseers. As seasons turned, these features of the figures focused sharper and clearer, and her incontrovertible fear of the unknown grew stronger and stronger. She had happily spent the first five years of her life playing around their feet, feeling the warmth of her father’s coarse khaki pants and gentle kiss of her mother’s flowing dress. The ripe leather of his shoes was polished and shining, but the daughter struggled to find her face in their reflection, as she had seen so many times in the musical cartoons that had been marketed for her entertainment. The inviting cotton of her mother’s slippers dazzled the daughter’s eyes with their bright colors from afar, but as she crawled close, she discovered the polka dots of purple and blue were nothing but a canvas for brown, matted threads and stains of dirt and grime, hardened with age beyond recognition, and somehow still retained an alien adhesiveness when touched by curious hands.

It was in this year that the daughter discovered how to look up.

There comes a time at that ripe age of five when one must endure the privilege of a western education. The mind is curious, young, and bendable, having been deceived into believing in a world of vibrant colors and happy endings, animated faces that sang perfectly written songs to them from a closely watched television screen. The figures happily sent away their naïve seed to the wood paneled schoolhouse, where she would receive the knowledge and education needed to become a contributing member of society in the dawn of the critical 21st century.

On her first day, she discovered many things: letters and numbers, words and pictures, names and faces, friends and enemies, students and teachers. But when an unfamiliar skirt standing in the front of the class called her name, she was so shocked that she couldn’t help but twist her baby blue eyes up to the first adult face she had seen in her entire life. It looked down at her, smiling a toothy smile, well practiced and well rehearsed.

But the daughter saw through her mask. She saw stains of yellow, painted on the teacher’s charming white teeth from years of nicotine and THC. She saw down her grey throat, it’s healthy ripe color burned away from boiling alcohol entering her chest and acidic vomit expelling through the same scalded tunnel, and giving off the shivering aroma of cheap vodka and the pungent scent of a toilet filled with oral expulsions of the same solution. She saw through her eyes, shining and bright corneas framed in dull black retinas. They sang a monotonous melody of years of youth and passion stripped away from her flesh with the fleeting heart of a lover, a dissonant harmony of pecuniary struggles and worldly wants, televisions and furniture she could not afford, in an apartment she would never see outside of the well lit, artificial photographs of domestic heavens in the latest Pottery Barn catalog cover. They pounded into the daughter’s eyes a rhythm of distrust, a cadence of regret that assaulted the teacher’s ears when she longed to find another pair of arms to hold her, a pair of eyes to calm her, a pair of lips to sing to her, and a touch that would send a warm tingle up her spine. This face was the song the adult sang to the child, meticulously composed in forty-nine bleak years, and as the child listened, she longed to look up and hear the song of her own parents.

When the teacher released her children, the adults mingled about the schoolhouse, waiting to pick up their effervescent offspring from their famous first day of school. They came out in waves, some more adept to collecting their crayons and markers than others who took the more care with their entrusted craft store valuables. Parents walked off, mother and father standing to either side of their child, as if protecting them from some unforeseeable but unavoidable danger.

However, two remained. Their daughter had not taken her place in between them to relive all the details of her first six hours of elementary school to them. Instead, the daughter had taken up hiding around the corner, eyes closed, hair covering her ears, and her head firmly crooked down.

She knew well the song of her parents. And she did not wish to hear it.

The Age Of Man
By: Teddy Murphy