Adventures in Fantastic and Faraway Lands

Don’t ask me how I found myself there, hiding in that closet. It would be too long and yet, somehow, too simple of a story. You know, because of the bullying aspect? And the kind of people who just can’t stand it if you’re like them and yet not like them? It’d gotten really old really quick, them always messing with me and calling me white just because I happened to be good at math, like that’s some kind of crime against humanity. As if being thirteen and black meant there was no way in hell I should be allowed to read Murakami books and play Eve Online. They couldn’t just let it go, couldn’t let me enjoy even one walk home from the bus stop in peace. No, apparently the act of me just being me so infuriated them that they had to go out of their way to try and beat me down every chance they got. It was like I posed some kind of threat to who they were, to their identity, and maybe that’s why they kept on with it. So if you really wanted to know, that’s more or less the story behind me ending up in the closet of one of those abandoned row houses over by Shipley Park, trying my best not to cry while hoping the mother fuckers who were after me would just give up and go away.

The main thing I remember about that old house was just how quiet it felt after I closed the closet door, after I’d caught my breath and my heart eased up. I can remember how much light found its way in through the crack under the door and how Mama once told me how you could tell if there’d once been carpet in a house because of the space under the doors. I remember the silence in that tiny little row house, a silence I’d quickly come to cherish and depend on in such a short, painfully short, amount of time, and how that silence was shattered by the voices and the sounds of their footsteps. How I myself had betrayed the silence by allowing that awful, girly whimper to seep out. How I had to cover my own mouth with both hands and hope that Daddy hadn’t been watching me from heaven right then, because he would have just shaken his head at what a weak little sissy his son still was. He’d always been telling me to toughen up and act like a man, but I was never able to understand what he’d meant by that, not even after he was gone for good. I remember how the voices came closer, became clearer and grew larger, like a spotlight shined in my eyes. And how I could hear exactly what they were saying, that they were speaking directly to me, and how bad it scared me when I heard them in the room, just on the other side of the closet door, taking their time and enjoying it. How they said they were going to do awful things to me and that nobody would miss me and how I then realized that they were more than just bullies, that there were demons on the other side of that door and that they’d just as soon kill me as have me keep on reminding them about all the things they were not. How they were the same age as me and had been in the same eighth grade class as me, only now they had those blank, empty eyes and those dull voices, like they’d done such bad things that there’d been no turning back and that something else had taken over and was now calling the shots, and so it said to them, you’ve already gone this far, why not just keep on doing bad things?

How, as their footsteps neared, and I could see the doorknob slowly turning, how I instinctively stepped back against the rear wall of the closet and how, as soon as I bumped into that back wall, it became, like, not solid any more, and I pretty much fell through the wall, I think, and landed flat on my back and when I opened my eyes, I could tell right away that the place I now found myself in was most definitely not East Baltimore.

It took a second, but my first thought was Oh no, I’ve hit my head and am now unconscious which caused me a lot of internal strife. On the one hand, it meant my body was now defenseless against whatever those bangers had it in their minds that they were going to do to. But on the other hand, it hardly mattered whether I was awake or not- I couldn’t put up much of a fight either way, so at least if I were unconscious for it, I’d probably be able to avoid a lot of the emotional scarring. That’s assuming I survived, of course.

But after rubbing my eyes and taking an account of myself, I realized that I was both conscious and also fully within my own body. That this was no dream. Even though, by all accounts, it appeared that I was now lying in the middle of some kind of cartoon world.

For instance, there was a giant rainbow stretched across the sky’s midsection like one of those championship wrestling belts. It would have been impossible not to notice it right away. I kid you not, the thing was so big you’d have to roll your eyes if you wanted to get a look at anything else in the sky, like if you wanted to see the clouds or something. But why would you want to do that? Those colors up there were so perfect and so comforting. They were like a poem written by someone who you could just tell genuinely loved children. The fear was leaving me, I could feel it melting away as a sense of relief warmed my skin. I couldn’t look away from the sky, and so I just kept on staring at it for the longest time. Strange thoughts welled up. I decided that the colorful bands up in the sky were the only true instances of green or yellow or red in the entire universe, and that the pieces of this rainbow must have been the Adam and Eve for all the colors in the world. Strange thoughts. The more I considered the rainbow, the more I felt like I was looking at God.

Before I knew it, I was crying. Back in that closet, I’d braced myself for the end, like, I was ready for that to be it. And then to suddenly find myself here in a place like this…for a second I considered the possibility that I was in heaven.

I finally was able to sit up and look around. There were colorful bushes and trees all around, ringing the edge of my vision, all wild and fluffy like pom-poms made out of cotton candy, crisp and bright as if they’d been painted into the scene right before I’d shown up. I realized I was sitting on grass, but this grass, it wasn’t real, it couldn’t have been real. I know I don’t exactly live in the country or anything, but I’d never seen anything like this before. I had to put my face right up to it before I could tell that there were individual blades down there. This grass was the softest stuff ever, and I got the weird idea to put a layer of it inside of every piece of clothing I owned. Looking back, I imagine that if anyone I knew had seen me right there in that moment, they would have figured me for a complete idiot, lying flat on my stomach, trying to swim in the grass.

I felt amazing, though.

Maybe it was just the relief from having narrowly escaped certain death, and maybe the things I was seeing and feeling wouldn’t have meant as much to someone else, someone different than me. Like someone who’d actually been outside of Baltimore before, been someplace that wasn’t all concrete and dirty buildings, honking horns and gunshots in the middle of the night. Maybe I was just glad that I’d gotten a second chance to be happy in the grass, on account of it not having been all that fair that my only other time to see so much of the stuff had fallen on such a sad day. Because maybe the only other time I’d really ever seen that much green grass was when we buried Daddy at the veterans cemetery, but I hadn’t been able to ignore the fact that underneath all that beautiful landscaping were other people’s fathers too, parents of kids maybe just like me or younger. But even if all those reasons were true, so what? So what if I was seeing this weird, fantastic world through the eyes of someone who’d lived a deprived urban life? It still didn’t matter, because it was my experience and that’s all we ever really get to have, anyway.

In spite of how crazy this place seemed to be, I couldn’t help wondering exactly where I was. Or who else might be living here and how I was going to get back, if I even was. Did this place have a name? And what about my Mama, what was she probably thinking by now? I struggled for an answer to even one of questions that flooded my mind but it was too much. I wasn’t used to this kind of bigness in the world. With each passing second, the ping pong game in my head sped up, as I bounced between an escalating love for this new world around me and a fear of the unknown that happened to be growing louder. But I couldn’t just lie there, I figured, and so, taking a deep breath, I finally stood up and took a look around me.

That’s when I saw them.

They were huddled behind some rocks that lined the edge of this little grove of orange trees whose oranges were the size of basketballs. I first noticed their little ears poking up but it wasn’t until one of them lifted his head to take a peek at me that I realized I was being watched by a bunch of fuzzy little squirrel people. At least that’s what they looked like to me. There were five of them, and as they crept out into the open, I immediately began treating them like small children, or as if they were mentally handicapped. I found myself speaking in a voice normally reserved for my great-grandmother, one that basically tried to remember what I must have been like when I was four, real high pitched and patronizing like a nursery rhyme. I kind of crouched over with my hands on my knees and I worried that I was bugging my eyes out at them.

“Hey there little fellas,” I cooed, and as the words left my mouth, I caught what I must have sounded like and it started making sense why those thugs had been picking on me. No matter what I tried, the little squirrel people just stood there, looking back at me with bulging black eyes. They had short, stubby little arms and legs that I found myself constantly wanting to squeeze while making sound effects. And fat little bellies, fuzzy and round. Paunch, I think, is the best word for describing them. Some of their stomachs hung over the front of their little trousers like someone who packed his parachute the wrong way. They were funny looking, to say the least.

“I friend, I Calvin,” I said, trying to form hand gestures that matched my words. We’d had these sign language people come to our class a few months ago, but they’d seemed real nervous and condescending so I didn’t pay much attention to them. But as I grew more and more frustrated with my own pitiful attempts at communicating my peaceful intentions through the flapping of my hands, I made a mental note to pay more attention the next time white people came to school. Deciding that I was getting nowhere, I gave up with a sigh and let my hands drop to my sides. The next few minutes ticked by with us just standing there looking at each other in silence until I realized how stupid I’d been for trying to communicate so crudely with these alien beings. “This is pointless,” I groaned.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” one of them said, “we’re sure as fuck getting a kick out of it.”

Let me say this. I’ve seen roughly a hundred or so movies where a person makes contact with either an alien or some kind of supernatural being, and not a single one of them, it turns out, was anywhere close when it came to portraying the human response to first hearing something that shouldn’t be talking, talking. Most of the time in movies, the main character would think Well, that’s weird and shrug it off. Then they’d just go on about their business, as if talking to an alien were no different than finding out your friend had gotten a bad fade or something. The movie ET came the closest, maybe, because of the way they had the kids screaming and stuff when they first discovered there was an alien in the house. Actually, that movie was the first thing that popped into my mind when that little squirrel person said the word “fuck” and it felt like my brain was doing a forced reboot and everything just went red, like when you looked at the sun with your eyes closed.

I knew that I’d lost a few seconds when everything came back into focus, only I was now sitting again and the squirrel people were standing around me in a very concerned circle. There were much more of them now than the initial five, maybe like thirty or so. I noticed that they were each holding what appeared to be a balloon, the long skinny kind that I’d once seen this guy at Six Flags twist into the shape of a dog. I found this a little strange.

“Hey, are you okay? We thought you’d stroked out on us,” one of the squirrel people said. It was the same one who’d spoken to me earlier. Maybe it was his job to do all the talking for the others.

“Yeah, I think I am. This is all just a too much for me to deal with, I might need-”

“Yeah that’s great,” he said, cutting me off mid syllable. “We were just wondering, are you here to help us kill the Poggies or what?” This caught me off guard and confused me.

“The what? And did you say kill?” I asked. Right about then was when I’d really wished that someone else had been there with me, like my friend Derrick, or my sister Trina, somebody I could ask, Did that squirrel really just say that? Someone to balance out all this crazy stuff around me, remind me of what actually was normal. And yes, this place actually made Baltimore seem pretty normal. I finally stood up and straightened my shirt and pants. “Don’t answer that, actually. First, tell me why you’re all holding those balloons.”

“What’s a balloon?” the leader asked. “These are our fucking swords.”

“You shouldn’t cuss like that. It’s messing with me every time I hear that word come out of your mouth, and especially with that voice,” I said, before adding, “No offense.” It was true, though. I couldn’t handle him cussing in that high pitched cartoon voice, clashing things that shouldn’t go together was like someone trying to make me laugh during a funeral. This wasn’t funny like the time at school last year when Martell Winston had sucked in helium and started rapping “Gimme Dat Nut”. This was just weird.

“Look, man, are you going to help us or not?” the squirrel asked rather impatiently.

“Help you what?” I asked. I admit, my thinking was a bit slowed, but only because I was having to pick through each and every thing that was going on around me.

“Help us overthrow the damn Poggies, the monsters on the other side of the kingdom who’ve been spreading their evil ways so they can enslave our people and rule the entire kingdom for themselves,” he said, rather passionately. “They stand for everything wrong with the world, and we need a champion to turn the tide of battle because these things sure as hell haven’t been getting it done.” He shamefully raised his balloon as if he needed to explain that it didn’t make for the greatest of weapons.

“How do we even know this guy can do jack shit?” one of the other squirrel people asked.

“Yeah, what if the Poggies end up kicking his ass, then we’re going to look like assholes,” another one interjected. Soon it was chaos, as the squirrels began loudly arguing over each other about stranger and stranger hypotheticals.

“How’s it going to make us look if we send over a dude and he doesn’t kill them the right way? Like how do we know he’s going to squash their skulls in a way that honors our religion?”

“What if he’s so good at kicking ass that he ends up turning on us and enslaving the whole damn kingdom, what then? I’m not cut out for being a sex slave. I mean, I’ll deal with it, I guess, but I sure won’t like it.”

“How does this guy go to the fucking bathroom when he’s wearing those pants?”

“Man, I wish we knew how to fight!”

Eventually it just became too much, so I told them all to shut up like I was some kind of hard ass librarian. I might have yelled at them a little too loud, because they all just sort of cowered there, squatting and looking at me with those terrified eyes, not making a sound except for the chattering of teeth.

“So let me get this straight, ok? These bad guys, you’re fighting with them because they’re trying to take over everything. And they’re the Poggies? So what are your people called?” I asked, hoping to coax them out of their frozen terror faces.

“We’re the Cha Cha,” the leader offered. I tried not to laugh when he said it.

“What’s your name?” I asked him. But my question was met with continued silence. Silence and a look of utter bewilderment on the faces of the other squirrel people as they turned to each other, wide-eyed. “Your name? Do you have a name?”

“I’m not sure what that word means,” the leader answered in a flat voice.

“Like what do other people call you, specifically? Like if they’re talking about only you?” I asked, pointing at him and thinking this would clarify everything.

“I don’t understand,” he replied. This was starting to annoy me.

“How do you differentiate yourselves? How do you guys refer to one another? Like if you were talking about this guy right here, what word would you use to let the person you’re talking to know who you were referring to?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t use a word, I’d just point,” he said, like he was talking to a dumb little kid. “We never go anywhere without all of the Cha Chas, so everyone we’ve ever known is always around somewhere close. So we don’t need to trouble ourselves with useless words like ‘nades’ or whatever.” I wanted to correct him, but thought, what’s the point? So I instead returned to the original subject.

“And I’m the only hope you have?” I asked. As frustrating and crass as the Cha Chas were, I still couldn’t help but feeling sympathetic to their plight. Just looking at them, their fuzzy little faces, those giant glassy eyes, I couldn’t think of a good enough reason not to help these poor little creatures out, especially if they were as defenseless as they appeared to be, what with thinking that a balloon was any kind of weapon. And maybe I got a little caught up in the narrative that was unfolding, maybe I matched elements of what was happening here with plot threads from previously-read graphic novels or games or books. Maybe I’d discarded rational objectivity a bit too quickly, like almost immediately, actually, but who could really blame me for having done so? I’d like to see someone else escape a gang of murderous thugs, then wake up on the set of Teletubbies, then get bum rushed by balloon-waving squirrel people, and, after all that, still feel the need to employ logic in their decision making. No, I’d love to see that. And plus, there was the fact that I might have be some kind of superhero to them, or, I dared say, the Chosen One, whose return was long ago prophesied in their ancient texts. A situation like this one was everything I’d ever hoped for back when reading my stories. Though I did hold out on asking them about my Chosen One status, fearful that their most likely answer would be a disappointing one.

“How dangerous are these Poggies?” I asked instead.

“Oh, they’re pussies like us,” one of them answered. “Only who knows how long that’s going to last.” Another one spoke up. “Just follow the rainbow and you can’t miss them, their kingdom is on the other side of that big hill over there.”

I looked in the direction they were pointing. An adventure! And in a very manageable and safe world, too. I smiled, my head full of ridiculous scenarios that all ended with me riding out a blizzard of flowers on a golden, yet humbly accepted, throne.

“He’s going to do it! The Brown Thing is going to slaughter the Poggies!”

And with that, a great cheer went up, one so inspiring that I found myself able to overlook the words “slaughter” and “brown” and “thing”. I’d finally arrived, I thought. This was my time to be the hero, my time to finally take a long-awaited stand against evil, and in a world that was more suitable to my temperament and relative abilities. As I marched off to the cheers and singing of the Cha Chas, I decided that after I liberated these adorable little creatures, I might seriously think about staying here forever and being their king. Assuming that I had any choice in that matter.

 

So there I was in this insane fairy tale land, sticking up for these cuddly little squirrel people who were also most likely a bunch of racists. I mean come on, they called me a brown thing, what was that about? But did I let that bother me? I mean, sure, part of me was like damn, even in a make-believe world they’re talking that shit, but at the same time it was something I could live with, given the circumstances. It’s amazing how much you’ll let slide when a whole civilization of squirrel people are depending on you for survival. So racists or not, they looked to me as their hero, their defender. I was the only one they could count on. That really meant something to me. And so instead of dwelling on what terrible people the Cha Chas were, I spent most of my hike over to Poggie-land daydreaming about my triumphant return to them and the joyousness with which the squirrels would surely beg me to be their king. Of course, my deep sense of honor would have prohibited me from accepting such a title and along with it the ornately jeweled crown that I spent a good five minutes designing in my head. It even had my name on it. No, I would decline it, while still reassuring them that I would always be there to guard and defend my new home.

And what a truly fantastic place it was. Everything was so colorful. If the world back home had been drawn like a regular old comic book, this place was at the very least a graphic novel, maybe even better. I’m talking the difference between hearing a song on an alarm clock speaker and hearing it with some of those three hundred dollar Beats headphones on your head. I didn’t even know colors like these were possible. Looking at the trees, just common every day trees, was like holding a kaleidoscope up to your eye. The leaves here were like glass, like those prisms that turned light into the rainbow, only the trees were filled with millions of prisms and they broke the light up into way more colors than just six. More like a thousand. And that was on every single tree. The whole time I was walking, I felt so torn between stopping for a bit so I could really take in the view and hurrying past so I could resolve this thing with the Squirrels as quickly as possible and get on with being like an honorary king or whatever. I struggled with it, going back and forth in my head more times that I can count. I’ll say this: if those things hadn’t looked like little cartoon teddy bears, I’d have been sitting my ass down and taking in the view like you wouldn’t believe.

I came to a clearing at the top of the mountain where the grass stretched out into this wide open space that made me think about Daddy. I’m not really sure why it did, it just did. Something familiar, maybe. It made me remember this one time we went to Six Flags, and I was real little and crying because he made me walk when I was all tired. A big gust of wind came out of nowhere and almost knocked me down. And then suddenly it felt like Daddy was right there with me, like we were walking across that field together. Now I couldn’t see him or anything, but I was as certain about him being there as I was of my own hands and feet. After a few steps, though, I wasn’t so sure that I should have been happy to have him there with me. I thought I heard words floating by on the edge of the wind, little bits and pieces of something he was trying to tell me, but I couldn’t fit them together. The air all of a sudden got real cold and the wind kicked back up and I finally could make out what he was saying.

You ain’t no hero, boy.

With that, the wind died back down, the sun glowed warm again, and I could no longer feel Daddy breathing down my neck. Silently mouthing the words he’d said, I looked around in every direction but one. I was too afraid to look behind me, too scared of what might have been back there. I just kept on walking. The more the sun’s rays warmed my skin, I felt my nervousness fading away. In no time, I’d put the whole thing out of my mind and found myself jogging down the side of a massive, rolling hill.

About an hour after I’d made it over the mountain, I came upon this group of frog-looking things that I only could assume were the Poggies. They were huddled together by a waterfall and playing some kind of weird game that involved throwing apples into leather dress shoes and humping the back of each other’s heads. I made it all the way to within a few feet of them before anyone noticed me, at which point the frog people immediately stopped what they were doing and stood up in unison to face me. From there though, they stayed frozen, no doubt filled with what I imagined to be an intense and paralyzing terror. At least I thought it was an intense and paralyzing terror but really, who knows. It was actually pretty tough to tell what they were feeling because, turns out, their little frog eyes were just like that all the time, always looking like they were just about to pop out of their heads, like in cartoons. Bugged out, twenty-four seven. Either way, their reaction kind of caught me off guard. Going by what the Cha Chas had told me about them, I’d been expecting the Poggies to be more, I don’t know…aggressive? Angry? Responsive?

Instead, the whole gang of them were all glassy eyes and blank stares. They were making those kinds of faces that dumb kids make when they zone out, all breathing in through their mouth and staring off into space at those weird upward angles. What was it with this place? Were all the animals here short and fat with the same kind of dumb and empty eyes? The Poggies were just like the Cha Chas except that they were frogs instead of squirrels. They walked around on two legs and their little webbed hands hung nearly to the ground on long, skinny arms. Most of them also had little pot bellies that made them look like old men, just like the squirrels. The only real difference was that the Poggies were clothed. They all seemed to be wearing the same kind of little green tunics, like Peter Pan, just like him actually, right down to the hat and pointy looking elf shoes. No tights, though.

“Hi,” I said. “Are you guys Poggies?”

I flinched. I was doing it again, I realized. Just like with the Cha Chas, I was doing that thing where I leaned over with my hands on my knees and spoke in a high pitched voice, like I was one of those weird white ladies at the library who never stopped going on about how well-spoken I was. Perfect, I thought. The only non-human forms of intelligent life ever discovered, and I just couldn’t seem to help myself when it came to talking down to them like they were in special ed or something.

“That’s an incredibly offensive racial slur you just made,” one of the Poggies said. “It’s vituperative, too, that’s another word that describes the slur you just used. I could think of several more big words to say in addition to that, but I don’t feel like it.”

“Huh?” I asked.

“The word Poggy is a racial epitaph,” another one said. He’d intentionally slowed his speech down as a way of patronizing me. I recognized it from my prior experiences at science fairs and on field trips out of East Baltimore. “We’d actually prefer it if you didn’t utilize such desultory linguistication. Great, thanks.”

Some of the words they were throwing out there didn’t sound right, but it felt like correcting them at that moment would have gotten me nowhere.

“Wait, so that’s not what your people are called?” I asked. “The Cha Chas back over on the other side of the mountain there told me that’s what you were called, so I’m just going by what they said.” I absolutely noticed the chorus of croaking that followed me saying Cha Chas. I also noticed a good bit of them actually craning their necks to look in the direction I’d thoughtlessly pointed in, as if expecting to actually see something.

“Ah, now it makes perfect sense,” said the one who’d first spoken. He turned to the others. “This guy’s a racist just like those resplendent spigots on the other side of the mountain who no doubt sent him here to transcribe us.” A disapproving murmur made its way through the crowd of Poggies. Or whatever it was I should have been calling them.

“Whoa whoa, I’m no racist,” I protested. “I mean, look at me, I’m a minority myself.” I held my arm out to them, as if by simply showing them my skin I could get them to understand something so obviously beyond their comprehension. I immediately felt stupid for having done so, knowing full well that my words were falling on barren grounds. But at least I wasn’t the only one who thought the squirrels were racists.

“I don’t think you know what the word minority means,” one of them said.

“Yeah, I do,” I answered. “It means the smaller number or part of something, usually less than half.”

He croaked at me. I think that’s how they laughed too, but it was impossible to know for sure.

As we continued arguing, I became more and more confused about this strange land and the weird creatures who lived here. I couldn’t for the life of me get what made it so hard for them just get along, or why they were so antagonistic. Why did they make it so difficult to just enjoy the beauty of such an ideal place and leave one another alone. They were a bunch of stuffed animals, for God’s sake.

“So what’s up with you and the Cha Chas then?” I asked.

“Well, they’re racist, just like you,” one of them answered.

“Can we not just move past that?” I said.

“And they transpire over here each and every week, trying to murder us with their balloon weapons,” he said. A second Poggie spoke up after him. And then another, and another. They came in rapid fire succession, like someone had set off a pack of fire crackers.

“And what about their language? It’s farking filthy.”

“They’re insouciant.”

“They want to force their religion on us!”

“Yes, they’re very insouciant! They’re an insouciant bunch of marker farkers!”

This went on and on. I wanted to be patient and hear them out so we could really get to the bottom of this thing. I actually managed to listen for a while, but eventually it felt like they were just making things up for no good reason other than to hear themselves talk.

“I saw one of them eating a rappleberry!”

“Their women don’t even have the decency to go in the water when they ploop!”

“They think the world was created in a week!”

“They said fuck the rainbow and that the rainbow wasn’t jack shit!” The Poggy saying this made air quotes with his fingers when he said the words jack shit. (Sorry, I’m just going to have to keep calling them that. I know it’s possibly racist to use that word but they wouldn’t tell me what to call them, no matter how many times I asked.)

After a while, I finally had to stop listening. I needed to think this thing through. These guys clearly weren’t the destructive force that the Cha Chas had led me to believe they were. Matter of fact, the Poggies seemed no more a threat to the Cha Chas than the Cha Chas were to them. And yet they were still all very clearly pissed off at each other, and over what seemed like pretty meaningless beefs. This place was turning out to be nothing like what I’d hoped it would be. It was turning out to be a big disappointment.

“Are you going to take their side? Because if you do it wouldn’t be fair to us.”

“Why would you take their side?”

“If you don’t take our side that makes you a bad person.”

“Yeah, it makes you a monster!”

“Why are you such a freaking monster, huh?”

“I hate you!”

And they wouldn’t shut up, they just kept at it. On and on with the next person to speak cranking up the bullshit on me even more, only to have yet another one jump in to top him in an even louder voice. And they were getting more aggressive, too. Everything was an escalation. I couldn’t keep a single thought in my head about what I should do next because they kept crowding in on me like a bunch of little kids begging for candy and here all I needed, and I mean the only thing I absolutely had to have right then and there, was to be able to sit down someplace quiet where I could try and imagine what Daddy would would have done in a situation like this.

“Hey giant! You need to save us!”

“Why are you so stupid, giant?”

“Yeah, why are you so stupid and evil and giant, giant?”

Before I knew it, I was pressing my hands over my ears and squeezing my eyes shut like I was a little kid at daycare and wanted my mommy. My neck and shoulders had gotten so tight, almost as if something was pressing down on me, only from the inside, and it was trying to get me to react and the whole time there was that voice again, saying you better not, son, they’re just dumb little animals, they don’t know no better. But I couldn’t help myself by that point, so I did it.

“Shut the fuck up!” I screamed. It was loud and it was mean. Real mean. But I was tired and fed up.

The relief that came from letting go and giving in to that thing that had been squeezing on me lasted no more than a second before this other feeling, this awful one, took control of everything and I saw the looks on their faces and I knew that, oh shit, they actually can show you that they’re scared just by the way they look and that voice inside my head turned on me and was all damn, all they wanted was some help, maybe you really are a monster, boy and he was convincing enough to where I believed him straight up. The Poggies were all in a pile, almost like they’d been blown over by a big old gust of wind. They had their hands up in that oh God, please, no kind of gesture and I started feeling really bad about myself but then that damn voice changed up on me again. I couldn’t hear it at first because I was too busy making my face look real apologetic and trying to say something about how sorry I was and how I didn’t mean to do that but my words weren’t coming out the right way and when I had to take a deep breath, I heard it talking again, like it was in the middle of a sentence that I just butted in to.

…a disappointment from the day we brought you home and that’s all you ever gonna be, so you might as well just go ahead and do it all the way, boy.

I knew what it meant right away and I got that feeling in my stomach when I know I’m about to do a bad thing and I don’t really want to but I know that I’m going to. Like when I haven’t eaten anything all day and then drink some ice water and it hits me right in the stomach and kind of aches only it still feels good. I was so tired. And I looked at the Poggies, who hadn’t moved a muscle this whole time, and all of a sudden instead of seeing them as these poor little things to feel sorry for, I was now seeing them for what they really were: a bunch of stupid animals who wanted to use me for their own benefit, just like those squirrels on the other side of the mountain. Getting played by a bunch of cartoon animals! I thought about back home and how tired I was of being scared all the time and how those corner boys were always after me and I knew they weren’t ever going to let up on me unless I was dead or even worse and how here I was in this make-believe land and I still couldn’t get any respect and in my head I just kept thinking about all the ways I let my Daddy down and thought why can’t anything in life be easy? I just kept getting madder and madder and before I even knew what was going on, I started making this real mean growling noise, like through my teeth, how the dogs do it. Of course that made me get mad at myself, only I couldn’t see it that way at the time, that it was my fault, so I blamed it on the Poggies and next thing I knew, I wasn’t really in control of myself any more.

“Get the fuck up, you hear me?” I said. I was snarling again, and not in the way regular dogs did, but like I was one of those Pits that they make fight each other, one of those maniac dogs that don’t how to stop once they get set off. The Poggies all jumped to their feet at the same time, like someone had pressed a button. “I’m sick of this shit, sick of people not leaving me alone when here I am, trying to do the right thing and you can’t even give me a second to breathe, so now here’s what’s going to happen: you’re gonna do what I say or else I’m gonna rip your damn arms off your body, you feel me?” I heard my own voice and it didn’t even sound like me. It made me even madder to hear myself talking like one of those corner boys, made me wonder if there’d even been a point in me trying all these years.

But still, I felt it. I felt the power I had over them. In the past I thought I knew what power felt like, but I’d been wrong. Now I really knew, and I could see that whatever it was back then I’d thought I felt, it definitely wasn’t power because this was true power, this was how I knew it was real because I held it over someone else. Reminded me of last summer when my cousins kept trying to get me to smoke weed and I finally broke down and smoked with them and they kept asking me you high yet? you high yet? and I told them I thought I was but the next time they got me to smoke, I realized I wasn’t anywhere near being high that first time.

I paced back and forth and my hands were still shaking. “I’m in charge now, you got that?” Not knowing what to do, they just sat there, not moving a muscle. “Go stand back over by the water and stop crowding me.” And they did, right away and with no hesitation. “Stop!” I yelled, and they stopped. I couldn’t help but laugh. Aw damn, you in charge now, boy the voice said and it laughed along with me. In my head it sounded like I remembered Daddy talking, but I was starting to wonder who the voice really belonged to.

I made the Poggies all sit in a circle and told them to wait right there while I went off to see about something. I let them know that I could come back at any time just to check up on them and that if any of them had even moved a muscle, I was going to break their legs in half, all of them. Then I headed off in the direction I came from, back over the tiny little hill they all thought was a mountain, back toward the Cha Chas.

I didn’t really even know why I was going back, I just knew I needed to walk, needed to calm down. I knew that sticking around would have only made me to get madder and madder. But walking didn’t help at all because instead of clearing my mind, I just spent the whole time thinking about what a disappointment this place had been. I thought about the Cha Chas and how they were just as miserable as the Poggies. I thought about back home in Baltimore and how overcome with relief I’d been after realizing I’d somehow escaped. I looked around and saw that the beauty of this world was fading. What had once been a source of hope and wonder now only seemed capable of taunting me. I continued to torture myself by dredging up those stupid fantasies I’d had about this place and how I was going to be some kind of a hero, as if fairy tales were possible or something.

I finally just had to be real with myself: the Cha Chas weren’t going to ask me to be their king. Shit, they probably wouldn’t have even thanked me or even remembered who I was. Everyone’s just in it for themselves. It doesn’t matter where you are or who you’re dealing with. And so I figured guess I might as well be that way too and as soon as I thought that, I started to feel much, much better. My whole point of view began to change. The world around me was beautiful again. Scenery struck me as even more vibrant that it had been before, as if the idea that I could just take this whole place over made things sparkle even brighter that before. I started feeling sick to my stomach, but I tried my best to ignore it and just kept walking. I looked up at the rainbow and instead of marveling at it, I thought to myself they’d better not backtalk me or I’m going to hurt one of those little bitches.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened. As soon as they saw me approaching, the Cha Chas forgot about whatever it was they’d been doing and ran over to me, wasting no time with the questions about me beating down the Poggies for them. You could just tell how anxious they’d been, waiting on me to come back like little kids whose Mama had gone to the store and promised to bring back a candy bar or something. And just like the little brats who’d pitch a fit if she didn’t bring back the right kind of candy, the Cha Chas flipped out right away when I told them that I wasn’t going to fight their little war for them. They were like little kids, they really were, the way they stomped their feet and made those loud whining noises so I couldn’t even get a word in to explain the situation to them.

“I fucking knew it, I just knew that brown thing wasn’t going to be worth a shit,” one of them said. “What’d I tell you guys, huh? But does anyone ever listen to me?”

They went absolutely nuts. It reminded me of the time we kicked over that giant ant hill, just pure chaos. Suddenly there were Cha Chas everywhere, running around all crazy and frantic, like they were on fire or something. Some of them actually started rolling around on the ground.

“I told you guys we should have waited to ditch the swords,” one of them said. “We could have at least made sure he’d wiped those frog fuckers out first.”

“Should’ve known a skinny bitch like him wasn’t going to get shit done.”

“What kind of a dickhead can’t even protect a bunch of poor fuzzies like us?”

I was getting pissed off again, I could feel it welling up. This time the anger felt like a volcano, the kind that blow entire tops off mountains and rain ash down on people living hundreds of miles away. The powerful kind, the kind that give no warning until right before it’s going to happen and then boom it blows sky high and for at least a few people, life is never the same again. Sometimes that first little warning comes as a tremor or maybe steam starts seeping out of the mountaintop, I don’t know; but whatever it is, people usually only take it as a warning sign after the fact, when it’s too late to do anything about it. And so when I clenched up both my fists and started grinding my teeth, I thought I was making it pretty obvious to the Cha Chas that my top was right about to blow, but when you’re as selfish and stupid as they are, you just keep right on worrying about all your petty little bullshit and that somehow made me start thinking about how unfair it was that I’d never have a Daddy any more and how it was maybe his fault that I got picked on so damn much and before I knew it I was screaming at them as loud as I could.

But a funny thing happened this time around. I’d expected my little outburst to have the same effect on the Cha Chas as it had on the Poggies, but to my surprise, the opposite actually happened and apparently my shouting caused them to react violently towards me. Perhaps it was instinctive, a reflex and nothing more. But before I knew it, they were coming at me real hard and showing me their little teeth like they meant business, so I had no choice but to start swinging, which I did. I’d already been jacked up just from thinking about Daddy and the way the Cha Chas had started talking shit when I knew just how weak they all were, but when those things actually started attacking me, my adrenaline began pumping something crazy. After my foot made contact with the first one’s little belly and he went flying, it was like someone had let go of this leash I’d been on without even knowing it and I just went crazy, picking them up and throwing them, punching them in their faces, stomping on them, it was savage what I did to those little squirrel people, that’s the only way I can really describe it.

And then everything suddenly stopped. There were no more of them coming at me, nothing else around for me to cause damage to. I found myself all alone there, looking up into their crystal blue sky, trembling and gasping for air. All around me were the bodies of these poor little creatures and as I looked around and it started dawning on me what I’d just done, I couldn’t hold back any more. I broke down right there and started crying like a baby, shedding those tears that only come when it’s just you and your Mama, the kind that rip their way out of you when you’re too tired to play it off any more and she’s just patting you on the back and rocking you back and forth like when you were little and still wanted to wake up tomorrow. I tried to cover my face with my hands but only felt silly trying to hide it. With my eyes closed, these little strands of ideas went back and forth, like little pictures that told only a fraction of the story. They were of Mama, and of me running and hiding every day after school, and the first Christmas I could remember Daddy being home and not off deployed, and of daydreams about me as the heroes from my favorite books and the adventures I’d go off on, and finally the last one, it was like a picture, the look on that one Cha Chas face when I’d slung him up against that tree and how destroyed inside I could already tell he was. I was nothing and I knew it. The voice inside my head was long gone and all that was left for me to do was run. Run and hide, like I’d done back home, like I was always going to do. No matter what I did in life, no matter what else happened, for me it would always be the same: I would have to run away.

I didn’t know where I was going, I just knew I had to get away. I’d been given the chance to be a hero but all I’d ever been was bad, all I would ever be was bad. My eyes blurred and my breath burned white hot. When I could run no further, I slowed to a walk, gasping for air, choking on my own self-pity. I came upon a clearing in the woods and there what I saw made me gasp like they do only in the movies. There was a door, just a door, standing on its own without walls or support, nothing on the other side of it but air. And yet right away I knew what it was. I grasped its brass handle and turned it. Before I stepped through, I took one last look back over my shoulder and was blinded by the setting sun.

The next thing I knew, I was back home in Baltimore, still crouching in the darkened closet with the voices of my pursuers hovering just outside the door.