Pinocchio

He knew he wasn’t like the others. Hadn’t his family moved to the lost Black Lands up in the north – meaning that he had been left behind. As his grandfather had said, at the time, he was one mouth too many to feed.

He remembered the kids back then all picking a straw from the old man’s hand, and wasn’t it him who had pulled out the shortest. His mother had hugged him, kissed him on the top of his head, wiped some dirt from his face, and then she had headed off northward with the rest of his clan. None of them looked back. He remembered that, clearly.

The Chang family had taken him in. Sure they had kids of their own, but he had fitted in with the two other boys, with whom he had shared a room. Downstairs , there were three ‘sisters’ and to be honest, he was happy enough. Although, he was always sure that he wasn’t like them.

The main problem was that none of the family would eat anything, so he always found himself hungry. He had to search for berries and fruit that were still growing in orchards left behind by his own kind.

The winters were the worst, for then he found he went days without a morsel of food to eat. The Chang family could never appreciate what hunger was; it never, ever bothered them.

If you had driven passed their house, you would have seen them all sitting in the garden, and perhaps thought - what a beautiful, tight, loving family. But you would have been wrong.

The boy had grown (which was a miracle in itself) and had matured in his ideas. He realized he couldn’t stay with this family for ever. At least, not with the way he was. He either had to change, or accept that he could never fit in and go north himself to find his own family.

The school that he attended could have been one that he would have gone to in the old days – well, except that they never taught religion, or biology, or chemistry, or most things that a school should teach, but the teachers were good and kind, and that mattered.

At least once or twice a day, he had to excuse himself and go to the woods at the back of the building in order to go to the bathroom. There were no toilets in the school, no canteen, no water fountains, and those missing things made him feel even more lonely.

His real family had stayed in the area longer than the rest, due to the fact that they had found employment as gardeners, assistants, teachers, and so on. But after the unrest, after the attacks, and after the beatings they had taken, they had all lost their jobs, and so food had become scarce. His grandfather had several sons who had moved north, and so the family had decided to do the same.

Some nights he lay in the bedroom that he shared and cried quietly to himself. Something his brothers and sisters could not do.

One day they had all been playing baseball in the back yard, and he had slid into second base, grazing his leg on the gravel. The blood was hot, thick and gushing - and so the mother Chang seeing what had happened, grabbed her own two boys and shoved them indoors. A little memory fix would soon put that problem to bed.

He lay their trying to stop the bleeding as best he could. Even now he still had a scar.

He so wanted to be like them, a real boy. One who didn’t need to eat, or pee, and one who definitely couldn’t cry - how much easier life would be. Each night he prayed (the way his original mother had taught him) and asked God to make him just like the Chang family. Yet, each morning, when he needed his first pee of the day, he knew that he was still the same.

The families in the area had pets, but the pets were the same as them – none of them requiring food.

One afternoon, on a hot April day, a dog was lying under a nearby bush. He had heard the noise on his way back from school and he was sure, he had never heard a sound like this before. He looked under the bush and saw that the dog was licking a wound in its leg. It was bleeding just like he did.

“Here, little dog. You’re okay. Come here.”

As he reached in and petted the dog, it whimpered and then crawled towards him. The two of them sat by the bush, and very quickly, the dog grew more comfortable in his company.

There was no way he could smuggle the dog, that he had decided to call Pinocchio, into the house. The Changs were robots after all and they could smell organics a long way away.

That night he could hear Pinocchio howling outside the house. He felt like howling himself, as both he and the dog were hungry.

He quickly ran downstairs and out the rear door, and luckily the family hadn’t heard anything. But he knew what he had to do. He had to leave and head north - just him and his dog. There was no use in wishing he was a robot like the rest. He had a heart and a mind and he would bleed when he was cut, and so did his best pal, Pinocchio.

It was better to live and die as yourself, than wishing you were someone, or something else.

And so, before the sun had risen much, the boy and the dog headed for the hills, and into a brave new world.

They howled all the way up the mountain side.

bobby stevenson 2019