They mete out life to him, though barely, in little tubes that blow and feed and suck and cajole him back every which way to the world of the quick. It's all a boy can do to keep body and soul together. The flesh is too weary to keep up with a soul born to curiosity.
And so we find him, all of 10 years old and not a day wiser to the ways of the world than when he was two. Lying in a bed that is not just any bed, in a room that is not just any room. A delicate bloom cultivated in a green house, not to sit in a vase in some rich woman's parlor some day but just to slog it through another day.
He usually does. He's a scrappy one they say. Physical pain doesn't touch him much. But how he feels. Must be that for every calcified someone who has somehow managed to trade his soul's birthright for tinsel, we find a Rico with a face as fleet with expressions as a sky prone to rainbows.
He is holding his mother's hand while she cries out of sight. He wells up too, his mother's miniature. As he will doubtless do when someone else's unknown mother quietly weeps at the far end of the hall.
Any emotional turbulence within his radius at all, this exquisitely sentient being will take it in. But with his mother perhaps, it goes back to the primeval link between baby's tears and mother's milk.
Some will call it a piece of cute maladjustment in one that's otherwise impaired. I don't know. What it suspiciously looks like is something that so many souls have passed this way without much of.... an abundant gift of human empathy.
