WPCA - Story Something Vol 1 (cont)

There's a breeze, not like warm summery with the sun shining down and you think of crappy commercials featuring demented teddy bears, no, I'm cold. It's coming from a window, open, with a pale crescent of a moon casting a sharp glow across a land outside that window. My head is tilted just enough I can look up and out the window, see the starts. I can actually recognize constellations, so that even despite my jump into an alternate reality, which I hadn't figured out at this point, I believed myself to be someplace normal, someplace like home, some place within the twenty-first century of the Earth I knew. I didn't think much of this, nor the plain blanket, nor the fact someone had stripped me down naked under the covers. I just lay there, content and drifted back to unconsciousness.

When next I woke, my eyes spied a young woman, possibly in her late teens, maybe early twenties, a shapely form. I was peering through these slits between my lashes, slowly inching my way up onto my elbows, getting my face up in hers. She was in my room, but I didn't know why. Why the fuck is this chick in my room?

Her hazels go wide upon recognition that I am, in fact, a member of the human race, alive, breathing and very much awake with a scowl creasing my forehead and lips. In fact, were this Christmas time, I would have looked the spitting image of a Scrooge.

The girl gets up and dashes away before I can say anything, and as I move to get up, I suddenly feel very, very naked. I lift the sheets, shocked to see that I am nude, pull them down and clutch them like a security blanket. I hear voices, girl squawking away someplace. I think I hear the brat's voice from the truck ride, and Pa once more. Aw, kind folks had taken me in. Have to wonder why they'd do something for me.

Pa walks in, bright smiles, cheery, good-natured, that image of morality and humaneness that just oozes all over him. He's balding, graying, decaying and dying by the looks of him. Pa is an old man. Weathered and wind burnt, seasoned, past his prime yet still fit. Not an inch of flab about him, all muscle for all his age. And he looks at me, looks me right in the eye like he can see my very soul, and I think for a moment that this man must be God or something.

"Gave us a start when you started shaking on us," Pa says. "Gone shat yourself, too. I'll get you some clothes if you don't want your old ones."

I can only nod dumbly. Sweet, fucking shit, I'm speechless at this man. I want him to keep talking, because the moment he stops, I feel this impending silence. My eyes flash every which way, nervous paranoia sprung from some deep place. I see Brat and Cute Chick in the doorway, watching me, both anxious in different ways.

"You gotta name?" Pa asks me.

That was the second time. First time I had turned all crazed on him, a real fucking retard banging his head on the wall looking for attention and making himself dumber in the process--the ultimate pity party. I'm broken, please give me attention like the whore I am. I felt like that now, a tongue-tied retard trying to whore for attention. I thought I might give in the shakes again. I fought it off, managed to mumble my name. Force it out like I was vomiting up something cruel. My name rose to my lips like bile.

"Jared," I blurt, "Jared Walsh."

Dear God, I am not Irish. Actually, I'm part Irish, only a small part mind you. And yes, I could probably drink a good many people under the table, but I live in America, so I don't love soccer, or football, so much, so I don't riot. And yet even as these thoughts plague me in connection to my name, this man is looking at me. In fact, the look in his eyes is one of reverence almost. Reverence for a shit-eating, cock-sucking mother-fucker who hates his wife, hates his job (that I had remembered quitting only the day before in some deluded fashion) and wants the world to end.

How in the hell does someone have reverence for me, especially in my completely gone state? I found out. I didn't like finding out, but I found out anyway.