I believe in nothing

Harlowe D'Angelo · 12-01-2010, 03:07 AM

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Word Count :: 338

The warm arms and the smell that he had known since the very first moment he could smell enveloped him, and Harlowe was a child again. She had never left him, and he was still young and whole and quite sane and he had never so much as thought about doing any of those awful things he had done. Or the awful things he had tried to do and failed at; he could not shake the bi-colored woman and his shameful failure from his mind. Now, however, it was blissfully quiet in his head, and active thought had left him. Fully grown and every bit an adult, Harlowe did not seem to care that he had become a mewling puppy in front of his mother.

“I don't know. It felt like you were here,” he confessed. The world around him slowly came back into focus, and the olive-eyed youth looked where his mother pointed. Where there should have been jealousy or love, there was only indifference. These children did share his mother's blood, true enough, but the chocolate-shaded youth did not know how to relate to them as living beings, let alone his siblings. Smaller children intimidated and confused him; he had not known how to befriend them when he was one, and it was so much more awkward as an adult.

Harlowe was dimly aware of the others around him; he detached himself slowly and painfully from his mother, though he remained seated. He feared falling to his knees again upon having a second, revelatory wave that Mother had, in fact, returned. He sat next to the puppies, sparing a glance or two in their direction. There was no time to contemplate their mystery -- Mother addressed the crowd, and Harlowe listened in rapt attention, a dazed smile on his darkly-tinted face. “Mother, I will follow you to the end of the earth,” he said, affirming the statement with an uncharacteristic smile. She was always the only one able to make him do that and mean it.

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