Posted on October 12, 2011 by Jenna
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It’s 1981 the year of our lord and there’s a new sun in the sky.
Vincent plays with her in the forest, laughing hide-and-seek in light and shadow, and when he sees her off-balance he steps on a sunbeam to make her trip. She falls and her face is all-over dirt and pine needles and she scrambles up and makes a funny face at him and they both laugh, and she tells him, “You’re a wicked child, Vincent,” and he looks down. “But you don’t mean to be, I suppose, so that’s OK.”
He’s fallen totally in love with her, of course; she’s ever so much more mature and wise and intelligent than a seven-year-old boy like himself, but more importantly, she’s the sun.
She can light up like a candle in the darkness. She can wiggle the sunbeams around upon the ground. She can burn a beetle, just like that, without even needing a magnifying glass like him.
She’s all the magic in the world.
When he’s tired out he flops down on an old log and he doesn’t mind the bugs that swarm in it and he flips a lock of hair out of his eyes and he says, “This is the best.”
She sits down near him.
“What is?” she asks.
“You,” he says. “Magic. All of it. My Dad helps make gods. Derek just works at the zoo.”
His tone is full of a contempt for Derek, who is his mother’s second husband. The man works at a zoo! What boy could possibly respect a zoo worker when his real father helps make gods?
This is mostly lost on Iphigenia due to her inhumanity and her poor comprehension of his circumstances.
“I see him,” Iphigenia says. “I think.”
“Derek?”
She’s squinting off into the distance. “His badge is totally shiny now.”
Vincent laughs.
“I’m going to grow up,” he says, “and learn to make gods, just like you, and then I’m going to learn to pull out dinosaurs.”
She looks at him.
“If you can pull fairies out of people,” Vincent says firmly, “and the sun, you can also pull out dinosaurs. Like a brontosaurus and an ankylosaurus. And then you can turn them into oil!”
Iphigenia scratches her head, then shakes out and resettles her long hair.
“I don’t know much about dinosaurs,” she confesses.
So he tells her.
[The Frog and the Thorn – CHAPTER TWO]
September 17, 1987
Vincent doesn’t get to go to school, of course, because he knows too many secrets; and he doesn’t get to go out and play with the gods very often, either, because he knows too few. Mostly he stays in his room and he reads about dinosaurs and magic and he plays with his action figures and he colors in his coloring books and he studies the approved curriculum for a child of Central’s staff.
He’s got pretty much the same textbooks as a good homeschooled Christian child learns from, to keep their souls safe from the Devil; but they’re not exactly the same books, and maybe that’s the reason behind it, the why and the how behind it, Vincent running away one night and finding himself down by the river, at the Devil’s house.
Or maybe it isn’t.
When it comes to standardized education and its failings, everybody’s got their own ideas.
“Yo, Vincent,” says the Devil, and the Devil stirs the fire.
The sands dripped through the hourglass
And the hour of the wolf closed in at last
And life is sweet and the sun is high
But the flesh and the fire are born to die
Vincent hesitates.
“Yo,” he says.
“I mean to twist you and tempt you away from the path of righteousness,” the Devil says, “if your Daddy don’t mind.”
“I think he’d mind that,” Vincent says, hesitantly. “Sir.”
“Ah,” sighs the Devil. “Just a few drinks, maybe, then, and I’ll send you home.”
Vincent licks his lips.
“If you don’t mind,” he says, “I mean, telling me, should I be running? Hard and fast as I possibly can?”
“All the roads’d just lead,” the Devil says, “to me.”
Vincent is pale. He is trembling. He doesn’t run and he doesn’t come in past the door. He doesn’t really know that this is the Devil, not quite—Central doesn’t hold with ideas like that—but he’s got enough sense to feel the trouble that he’s in. So he stands there and he shakes; and after a while, the Devil sighs.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” he says.
So Vincent relaxes.
“Take off your coat,” the Devil says. “And leave your shoes by the door. And come have a drink. I won’t ask again.”
Vincent takes off his coat. He takes off his shoes. He leaves both of them by the door and he walks in to the couch.
“That means,” he says wisely, “that even if I don’t have a drink, you still won’t ask.”
“That it does,” the Devil agrees. “I won’t ask again, whether you get a drink or not; and I can rip you into pieces and scatter you across the world whether you’re hanging out all comfortable or shivering and squirming at the door. Sometimes things just are the way they are, they tell me, and there’s nothing that a devil or a man can do.”
Vincent swallows.
“So it’s better not to worry overmuch,” the Devil says. “Let’s not. Let’s not worry. Let’s not fret. Let’s not make this into some kind of game. Let’s just have a good time and a talk, Vincent—you and me.”
Vincent walks nervously to the couch.
“You’re a weird kind of god,” he says, “I think.”
He pours himself a drink at the couch-side table. He picks it up. He sits.
The Devil, he gets himself a drink of his own and he sits down facing Vincent, and his body’s all in shadow and there are fires in his eyes.
Vincent doesn’t let it shake him. The Devil himself it was who’d told him that he didn’t have to be afraid.
“After a bit of a mental review of the gods I’m familiar with,” the Devil says, “and the gods I’d guess that you would be familiar with, I’ve got to admit that that hurts, Vincent.”
“Well,” Vincent says, “I mean.”
He doesn’t actually know what he means. Not at first. Then it comes to him.
“You’re meaning things that you’re not doing,” Vincent says.
And that’s when he starts to get an inkling. That’s when he starts to think that this might just be the Devil. Not because of the fire. Not because of the horns, or the shadows. Not even the promise of temptation.
It’s just that he doesn’t seem quite straightforward enough to be a god.
There’s a girl in the sun
And there’s girls in the sea
And in Elm Hill’s cages
There’s a girl like me.
It’s ’87, and the sun’s gone down, and Vincent’s sipping the Devil’s wine; and as he’s drinking, Vincent’s thinking, I do not want to go to Hell.