The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth by Veeraporn Nitiprapha

Author:Veeraporn Nitiprapha [Nitiprapha, Veeraporn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-23T06:00:00+00:00

XV

The Boy of the Night

F our forty-eight a.m., the entire neighbourhood was woken by a scream; the awful howling of a beast in anger, or great pain, belted out at intervals as if it was competing with the sound of the rain. Pran leapt up from his mattress and ran outside. The howling stopped, and then started again. Streetlights illuminated vertical raindrops like a million nails shooting down from the blood-red sky, and there was the hazy form of a figure dragging itself slowly along the road. Pran saw Patra, naked from the waist up, his legs about to give out, screaming that maddening scream. He was holding something in his arms: Paradorn.

Rain splashed on his face as Pran ran towards him and held out his arms to help support the body that was about slip from its father’s embrace. But Patra jerked away and lost his balance. He fell to the ground but still held his son tightly as he wailed, Pran, it’s my fault – I did it. Pran trembled though he didn’t feel cold, not at all. I did this to him! Patra looked down at his son and sobbed.

I gave it to him. I gave it to him with my own hands, he said, looking up at Pran with eyes haunted by despair. His wailing was hoarse, croaky, hopeless. Pran, I killed my son. Lightning flashed and Pran started trembling again. I gave him the powder – I injected the fucking stuff into him. I gave it to him and I lay down beside him, Pran. I lay down beside him all night… Patra screamed that beastly scream again.

Paradorn’s eyes were wide open, drifting, bleak, inundated by the rainwater pouring over his face. The moment Pran wiped his hand over his friend’s eyes to close them, he started to cry. Pran had never expected this, never, and he wondered why it hadn’t crossed his mind before. At that instant, as Pran burst out crying, his chest heaving, he closed his eyes and saw a father carefully pushing a syringe frothing with heroin into his son’s vein, then covering him with a blanket, stroking his head and face lovingly, as he always did. After that, he administered the drug to himself and lay down beside the boy so they could plunge together into a dark wonderland, father following son, only to discover later that the boy hadn’t come back out of the hole with him because he had become trapped, forever, somewhere in that fathomless neverland.

Devastated amid the ruins of the last family he would ever have, Pran could only sit there crying, rootless, demolished by fate in the piercing rain that kept stabbing him, over and over, one sharp drop after another, until he was completely wrecked, and, still, it continued penetrating inside him, devouring him, leaving only that unanswerable question: why…? When the hours of cold, hard rain that seemed to know no end finally ended, Pran stopped crying and, for the first time in his life, felt the curse of solitude that would remain with him until his final days.

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