The Gray House

THE HAPPY BOY

In the room they call Stuffage, a seven-year-old boy woke up one early morning. At first he thought that it was a bad dream that made him wake up. He lay there with his eyes shut tight, trying to remember what was so disturbing that he saw, but the dream kept slipping away, not letting him catch it, until the boy got tired of chasing it.

When he opened his eyes he was astonished at the sudden change in his mood. He was usually gloomy and irritable in the mornings. But not today. This morning felt wonderful. He looked around the room with an unexpected and unfamiliar delight. Looked at the roommates, their heads buried in the pillows, at the clumsy drawings on the walls, at the pink blot of the sky in the windows thrown wide open, and finally, with a strange longing in the pit of his stomach—at the head of his brother on the other edge of the pillow. The head that was an almost exact copy of his own. The boy knew that this wondrous feeling was going to disappear soon, and in the hopes of making it linger just a while longer he shook his brother awake.

The brother opened his eyes. Round and bugging, they didn’t close completely even in his sleep. That glinting sliver between the lashes, making it look as if he wasn’t really asleep but just faking it, annoyed everyone. Except his twin, who had the exact same peculiarity.

“What?” the brother who just woke up whispered.

“I’m not sure,” the boy said, also in a whisper. “I’m feeling kinda strange. Kinda liking everything, very much, so much I want to cry. Do you have it too?”

The brother searched inside himself.

“No,” he said, yawning. “Not yet. Could be because I’m still sleeping.”

And he closed his eyes hurriedly.

The boy lowered his head onto his end of the pillow and tried to go back to sleep. The joy that had been overflowing inside him was not going away. He pressed his palm against his heart, as if probing it through the skin. Cradling it.

He did not know yet that this feeling would stay with him for a very long time. It would become less sharp, almost mundane, but at times would strike him again with the same unexpected force, like a soft blow, making him gasp in wonderment, filling his eyes with tears and his soul with delight. He also didn’t know that he and his twin were now and forever different from each other. That he would always look older. “More corrupt,” Black Ralph would say. When the boy overheard that, he wouldn’t be offended. That would be another new feature of his character—nothing much would be able to offend him anymore.