A Novel, New Method of Sensitivity Training
It is a small, one-room Louisiana jailhouse with iron bars and a searing tin roof in which the boy is imprisoned. Thirteen years old, the freedom loving child has committed the ultimate crime against humanity and has been caught red-handed, and so he must suffer its justice. The boy spends much of his time standing on his cot hoping to nab some fresh air, and to better see out the window, wincing painfully when one of the fingers clinging to the window’s sill accidentally brushes against the scorching bars.
In the corner of the window cowers a tiny black widow. The boy has named the pest Polly. He lets Polly be, mostly, unafraid of her nature to bite. More-so he pities her, she being stuck in her own prison, what with a blue lizard awaiting it on the inside wall and a tarantula on the outside and nary a breeze to parachute away upon. Yes, much like the boy, the spider finds herself too curing alone in this post-modern pickle jar.
Yet, it is not just these two with troubles. This infernal little environment is safe for none, as the blue lizard has his own worries, tasting like chicken and sharing a room with our starving boy. And outside a Piper has spotted the tarantula, and a moccasin has curled itself up in the shade of the jail’s wall, and a gator roars angrily from out the bayou, and all this while a dusty devil of buzzards circles ever higher up the blue-clear sky above.
It is a rough place for a boy out of tobacco, his every craving unsatisfied, a hellish though deserved place. But do not pity him. The boy has committed a crime… many crimes, in fact. He is a criminal, who first and mostly has forgone God. Besides that though, the boy has killed the father who resented him, and has escaped the widow who would gentrify him, festering him with sentimental, matriarchal rules. This boy has run, and rafted, and fished, and wished, and smoked, and joked, and done it all naked and shoeless and free of guilt or shame, til now.
So you see, he is the vilest sort, and is deserving of all that comes to him, the happy little shit.
But those are not his worse crimes, not by a long shot. The boy has also lied, and stolen.
He stole a man’s property and ran away with it! He pretended sickness and death to keep that property. He resorted to trickery to evade its re-capture. The boy had the fucking gaul to take another man’s man and give it hope, friendship, and freedom! Good God, you may ask! What in thunderous tarnation is wrong with the lad?
But, no worries. He is finally caught, called out by the righteous throngs.
Because incredibly, even these are not his worse crimes. He is much more nefarious than a liar, a thief, a murderer, or a happy child willing to risk his free way of living just to save another from bondage. This lad is so much worse. This boy has allowed a bad word into his 150 year old narrative… a hurtful word. And he has allowed it in on purpose, his intent to shock, and to disgust, and to apply a liberal coat of guilt across the wall of humanity he fully intended to tear down when he began narrating the story, and unveiling the fucking hypocrisy’s surrounding him.
But instead humanity has torn him down. Huckleberry indeed!
God have mercy on this poor boy’s soul, for we, with our outraged volumes full of feelings, shall have none.
Chapter II