A person’s a person, no matter how small.

  Dr. Seuss

  _____________________________________________________________

  The kid looks at me, and I look back. His eyes stay locked onto the Glove, but, eventually, they turn up to face me.

  “Does it hurt?”

  The question is quiet enough that I barely hear it. He says it like he’s scared to hear the answer.

  “A little,” I tell him. “Mostly when I move it. It’s… it feels different, mostly. Not really good or bad.”

  “Oh. That’s good.”

  “Yeah, I… I guess so. Does… does it hurt for you?”

  He doesn’t say anything for a little bit, but eventually he finally looks away and gives a little nod.

  Oh my fucking heart.

  The kid looks to be around ten years old, maybe 12. Around that sort of age where kids stop being “kids”, but aren’t teens yet. Without the disorientation of fight-or-flight instincts kicking in, I can get a better look at him. What I thought were well-wrapped bandages have instead turned out to be amateurish, rolls of gauze wrapped tight around the kid until parts of him look like a mummy. It looks like he might have done it himself, and in something of a panic, judging by how many layers and how scrambled parts of it look.

  The bandages are useful for one thing, though- they mostly block off the parts of him that look wrong. For all that his face still looks so young, and his arms are similarly proportioned, his shirt is bulging… weirdly around his waist, and the pants he’s wearing are long, stretched out into a space beneath the covers, like they belong to someone much larger than him. He’s out of proportion with himself, and I see that the parts where that’s most true are the parts he’s wrapped tightest with the gauze.

  And still, the amateur job ensures that there’s gaps from where things peek out. The clothing they gave him might have been hanging out in a bin somewhere, rather than anything suited to fit the kid- even for the weirdness of his frame, they’re much too large for him, baggy and grey, and they leave a bit of space where his legs peek out from how pajama-like they are.

  Around his stomach, where the gauze is wrapped particularly thick, there’s a grey liquid seeping into the bandages. From that space in the middle… something blinking. An eye.

  Not like the one I saw on Jay, interestingly enough. It follows me, staring across the beds, but it’s milky-white, like someone with extreme cataracts- or, considering the color, like the eyes of someone dead. The cloudiness doesn’t stop it from rolling to follow me and track my movements as it shifts, and apparently, the kid notices.

  He pulls the sweatshirt down over further over the bandages, and his legs shift a bit under the covers.

  I look away, making sure to give the kid some space. If he doesn’t want to be looked at, that’s fine. I’ve had friends with similar issues before, and… well, generally speaking, if someone sets a boundary, even if it’s subtle, it’s good manners to follow it.

  “Sorry to hear that. Good thing you’re in the clinic, right? So they can help?”

  The silence after that doesn’t particularly reassure me.

  “Did you wrap those bandages yourself? Pretty good job.”

  “It’s ok.”

  Yeah. Alright. If it wasn’t clear from the weirdly proportioned body and the dead tissue oozing from out of his fucking torso, I’d say it’s pretty clear now that something happened to this kid. Something bad. He’s completely shut down.

  …

  Fuck it. The rest of the world can wait. Kid’s hurting, and he can see my hand. Even without the practical weight of curiosity egging me on, the fact is that if his stuff is anything like mine, I might be the only person who can actually fully see what’s going on with him.

  Being young is already pretty lonely. Experiencing something that no one else is, that no one else has experience with around you, only makes that isolation feel a hundred times worse.

  Sure, my personal childhood traumas aren’t quite so… overtly dysmorphic and fleshy, but that doesn’t mean I can’t relate. It doesn’t mean I don’t understand some of what it’s like to be alone, and to feel alone.

  “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s ok. But I haven’t found anyone who noticed my hand right away before. And… if they’re not being helpful here, then maybe I could notice something. And even if not, it can be nice to have someone to talk to sometimes, right?”

  Silence in the room for a little while. Quiet, save for the whispering of the curtains on the beds.

  But the kid doesn’t draw the curtains.

  And then, eventually-

  “I got hurt. In the woods.”

  I wait. Make sure to give him lots of space to respond, to say something if he needs to. When he doesn’t, I just nod.

  “That sounds… yeah, kid, that sounds pretty bad. Did the nurse help you at all?”

  The kid nods. “Yeah. A little. But she says that it’s all in my head, even though it’s not. I know it’s not. I know.”

  “Hey, hey, it’s ok. I know. Maybe… maybe you can tell me more about it? What did she say was in your head?”

  “The way it hurts. The cold. I can’t really feel it on my legs, but up here, around my stomach, it’s always cold and wet and slimy and bad.”

  “...does it move? If you tell it to?”

  Again, that delay before he says anything. Like he’s not sure if he could, or should, talk about it. In his situation, I might feel the same… so I just wait.

  “It’s more ok on my legs. I can’t feel it as much there. But I think that’s because there’s something wrong with them. I… I think if I try to take them off, I won’t be able to walk.”

  “Did… did you hurt your back?”

  He shakes his head vigorously, hair falling over his eyes as he shakes and shakes and seems to almost convulse with the act.

  “No. No. Something hurt me. A monster. It… it hurt my grandpa, and Bill, and then it did something to my back and I think it broke it and now my legs are wrong but they’re helping me but it feels bad it feels wrong and I don’t want it I don’t want it-”

  “Hey, hey, it’s ok, it’s-”

  It is visibly not ok, and the kid’s starting to tear up. I can hear his breathing getting hitched and uneven as he tries to inhale and fails, the sound of a lump in one’s throat blocking that passage of air.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Fuck it. I’m not letting this kid cry without trying to fucking do something about it.

  I get up out of bed (holy fuck my muscles feel sore, I almost fell just then) and stumble my way over to the bed next to his, sitting down (read: collapsing) into the frame. The kid’s lost enough that I don’t think he even notices at first, or at the least most certainly does not care.

  I…

  Fuck it.

  I reach into my bag and pull out the mouse.

  It’s a bit deformed from when I pulled it out of the locker, meat long-since turned to mold and fungus not really up to the task of holding its shape, but it’s still recognizably a little rodent, it’s long tail draping into my bag where I know it splits and spreads like a series of capillaries from a river.

  But almost immediately, the whispering comes back, more frantic than before. The poor thing’s probably going to need some sort of repairs later, but for now, the way it’s expending emergency funds to try and do whatever it’s doing works in my favor.

  Hi hello hello come here it’s warm come here it’s safe it’s warm there’s food come here taste come here rest come here

  Unveiling a potentially infectious undead mouse-lure was… not what I had in mind when I began this conversation. But between hugging a random kid who barely seems to want to be looked at right now, let alone held, and letting him fall into a full breakdown of sobbing. Part of that is selfish, yeah- he seems like a regular kid, not a decades-dead fungus monster or a gargoyle. Someone… like me. I want to ask. I want to know.

  And another part of it…

  If the kid starts crying, and someone comes in to check on us, I’m certainly not going to be able to help him or understand what’s happened.

  And apparently, the idea I had works.

  The kid stops, and turns, and stares, wide-eyed, at the little mouse thing, held gently in my Gloved hand.

  For a little while, we both just listen to the thing murmur, its voice-without-a-voice echoing in the space around us. It’s a little thing, just for us, something distinctly strange that’s also not an obvious modification or something outright dangerous.

  “Is… is it a mouse?”

  I nod. “Yeah. I found it.”

  “My pa says that mice are vermin animals.”

  “Well, your dad’s not all the way wrong. If you let them run around and eat everything, they’re a pretty big mess. I used to live in a place that got some in the walls- real gross. But this one doesn’t run around, and I don’t think it’s gonna make more mice. Plus, people have pet mice sometimes.”

  The kid’s eyes widen, before they narrow again and arc one of his brows. “People keep mice as pets?”

  I laugh at that. “People keep anything as a pet. People keep tigers and tarantulas and rocks as pets. Of course you have people who like to keep soft little mammals that can be clever.”

  “People keep tarantulas as pets???”

  “I hear they’re pretty smart, too. At least, for spiders.”

  “But their brains are tiny. No way they’re smart.”

  “Not smart like you or me, no. Smarter than other spiders, though. Maybe their brains are bigger, or maybe their brains are good at doing different things. Brains are weird like that.”

  Without an obvious rebuttal, he just nods, accepting the point. Which is good- brains are weird. Certifiably.

  The silence drags a bit, and I notice the kid’s attention drifting back towards himself. He doesn’t seem like he’s going to start crying right this second, though, which is progress.

  “Where’d you find it?” he eventually asks, his voice quiet.

  I can recognize someone wanting to avoid a difficult topic, and in this case, I don’t mind helping them along.

  “Out in the woods,” I lie. “I heard a little whisper, and there it was, a little mouse, all weird. It’s like… part mouse, part mushroom.”

  A fresh victory- I actually get a little giggle out of the kid. “Part mushroom? That’s weird.”

  “The world is full of weird things sometimes, kid. Apparently more than most people know. Some of it good… and some of it bad.”

  He doesn’t need to nod for that. I can see in his eyes how deep that particular truth rings for him.

  “I got hurt by some of it. A little while ago. I got a little better, but it still freaks me out to think about it. A friend of mine helped me out, and that helped me to understand a lot more about what happened and what I can do. After that, I figured out how to control things a little more. That’s how I did this to my hand.”

  His eyes widen a bit, turning from himself to stare at the Glove, its long fingers extended out into a little podium for the mouse and its sample of fungal infection. “You did that to yourself?”

  I nod. “I found out how different I was, and I figured out how to use it. How to change some of what happened to me into something I can use. Something… a little like your legs, maybe?”

  Gentle. Gentle. The kid’s fucking traumatized. I’m not going to help, or figure out what’s happened to him, by pushing him further into it.

  But it doesn’t mean I’m not being honest. It really is better to talk about it, and I can’t help if I don’t know what happened. Maybe I can’t help at all, but I definitely can’t help if I don’t know what’s going on or what, exactly, has manifested in this kid.

  “They help me walk,” he says, his voice a whisper. “Cause my legs got hurt. Cause of my back.”

  “Yeah. Do you know what hurt your back? Where it happened?”

  “We… were in the woods. Grandpa took me and Bill out for hunting cause he said it’s important for me to learn it and it’s good. Said that if boys want to grow up into big brave men they need to go do big brave things.”

  He’s tearing up, but not crying. Rather than falling into the pressure, he’s just feeling right now, staying afloat in it for now.

  “I was really tired and really cold but it was really pretty and we didn’t catch anything but grandpa says that’s ok, that we had all weekend, and then we went to bed. And then it got really really dark but I wasn’t scared even though I had my own tent, because I thought it was safe because Bill and grandpa were there and they said it was ok. They said there weren’t any monsters in the woods, just animals.

  “But there was a monster.”

  I give him a little bit. Let him breathe. Only when it seems like he’s relaxed a bit do I pull back the mouse. Not putting it away, just… clearing the space. It would be trite, I think, like waving a toy in front of the kid.

  After a little bit, his breathing evens out, his hands fidgeting with the cheap blankets on the bed rather than clenched at his side.

  “Can you… tell me about the monster? Do you know what it looked like?”

  The tears are close, now. Pushing up past his eyelids, forcing him to blink and scrub at his face.

  “It was big. Like a gorilla, but bigger. It was so dark, and-”

  “Like a gorilla? Like with the big arms in front?”

  The kid nods. “Big, big arms. It picked me up so easy, and it… it put me on the ground. It put me on the ground, and then I saw… I saw-”

  “Hey, hey, it’s ok. It’s ok. Listen to my voice, ok? You’re here. You’re here now. You don’t need to worry about the monster in here, ok? It doesn’t like to come indoors, and it only comes at night.”

  His eyes widen, turning to look at me.

  “You… you know the monster?”

  I nod. Hard not to recognize that descriptor, and frankly, the chances of two gorilla-gargoyles in one town seems low enough that I can risk a guess.

  “Yeah. I know that monster. It’s the one that hurt me, a little while ago. The one I mentioned.”

  “Did… how did it-”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? You know the monster, but you don’t know?”

  I raise my non-altered hand, stalling him as he gets more and more anxious. “I know that it attacked me, and it hurt me, and I only got away because it got distracted, I think. I’m not… I don’t understand everything about this.”

  Maybe not the most reassuring thing to say. Then again… I’m not going to baby the kid. Treating him like an idiot, like a little kid, is only going to piss him off, in my experience.

  I don’t need to treat him like an adult, per se- that’s a whole separate potential fuck-up. But, in my limited interactions with kids, be they family, friends of family, whatever, treating them like they don’t understand anything not said in baby-speak is worse than just talking to them honestly.

  And, at least for now, it looks like it’s working. At least, it doesn’t look like he’s going to panic right this second.

  “Listen, my name’s Ilia. Ok? Ilia Silva. What’s your name?”

  “...Brian.”

  “Alright, Brian. I think that maybe the world is bigger, and scarier, than we knew about. I’m still working on figuring out how, and why, and I think it’s important that you listen to what the doctor’s tell you, ok? I’m doing my best, but I’m not perfect. But if you need help, then I want you to talk to me, and I’ll help us figure things out together. Sound good?”

  Silence, for a while at least. And then… a nod.

  “Ok. Good.”

  “...can I… keep the mouse? Like… as a pet?”

  I can’t help but chuckle. “Maybe not this mouse, ok? I want to make sure it’s not a scary kind of mushroom that it’s made of before I give it to anybody.”

  He nods, though I can tell it’s not what he wanted to hear. “Well… maybe once you figure it out?”

  “Yeah, kiddo. I think we can do that. Once I figure more out.”

  A click from behind me.

  The door swings open, and I see someone wearing a doctor’s white coat walk in, followed closely by a woman in a black suit and a man in military fatigues.

  “Oh! Excellent to see you up and awake, that’s perfect. Glad to see you two are hitting it off, hmm? Your name is…”

  The man looks down at his clipboard, then smiles up at me. “Ilia! Sorry, your friend just finished filling out the forms. It’s good to see you up and moving, but I’d like to run some basic tests-”

  “If it’s alright, doctor, we can take it from here, just for now,” says the woman in the suit. She’s smiling, and it’s showing too much teeth. “Best to get interviews done right away, make sure the information is fresh in everyone’s mind.”

  Officially back up to 8 solid chapters ahead over on patreon!

  And just for funsies, here's the discord!