Story #27: Shortcomings and Goings

Story #27: Shortcomings and Goings I started like a puzzle that had already been complete; every piece meticulously arranged to form a cohesive picture. I was whole. That puzzle would precariously sit upon the living room table, unperturbed by the daily workings of life, but always carrying some level of risk. An errant knock, a clumsy spill, and that puzzle could see ruin. Those would be accidents though; mishaps that couldn't be controlled, predicted or blamed. The puzzle that was my life was as safe as could be reasonably hoped. But what of intentional acts? The proverbial child, pernicious and unruly, who could bring destruction and disarray to the order that I had so faithfully held? Each piece could come unplugged from the whole, and with it, another facet of my existence would unravel, like the woven thread of a blanket. The symbolism was much less abstract than it may appear. Whatever that thing is that began to do this to me, it could be mistaken for a wretched brat. I learned to see beyond that ruse; with myself coming undone, I was able to pull back the curtain and get a look beyond the veil. From the first time that I saw him, he had been changing the winds of my fate. He had just been some obnoxious neighbor kid; a little creepy, but mostly annoying, and with a bad habit of appearing from seemingly nowhere. When I moved here a few months ago, I had just started my PhD program, but now? I was attending Mrs. Leslie's third grade class, and struggling too. It almost feels like a waking dream, or like I'm caught in some twisted purgatory. The changes had been subtle at first, and I had just thought that it was my haunted mind playing tricks on me. The stress of my school work had been weighing on me pretty hard, so it was easy to brush off my forgetfulness or sudden weight loss. That kid, Vincent, always seemed to be outside when I was getting the mail or going out to my car. He would ask me questions, like any curious kid might, but they'd be offputting and frankly barbed. It was as if he could pinpoint my insecurities, even ones that I wasn't consciously aware of myself. He was trying to understand the puzzle. He could see me, the full picture, but he needed to know about the pieces that fit together. There wasn't any humanity behind those prying inquiries, and I had soon started to try avoiding answering them altogether. It felt more like a predatory animal that was trying to trick its prey, but it wasn't acting out of a sapient desire, but instead a mechanical instinct. It didn't really know what the words meant that it was saying. It could just mimic and approximate human interactions as a way to ensnare its prey. This method of instinctual analysis allowed it to unravel me, one fiber at a time, until it pulled hard enough to distort my existence. This beast had devoured nearly two decades of my physical being, and while I felt like my mind must surely still be intact, my inability to conjure answers to basic elementary questions made it clear that my intellect had been gobbled up to some degree too. The world around me changed to compensate for these alterations; now that I was in third grade again, I was once more living with my parents, even though it was in the house that I had bought. Every morning brought the dismal disgrace of a swollen Pull-Up between my thighs, and I'd already accumulated two strikes at school for soaking my pants during class. This wasn't what my experience had been the first time around, meaning that I wasn't simply being flung back into the past, but that my timeline was becoming disoriented and tangled; some threads from preschool had surely gotten knotted up with the threads of third grade. This also seemed to account for my apparent academic deficiencies; my knowledge must be tangled with a year or two below where I should have been at this age. Pieces of the puzzle were being stripped down, much like my new morning routine. This devolution was becoming impossible to stop. Vincent always seemed to appear when I stepped outside my house, much like a wolf waiting at the warren of a rabbit. I never saw him out the window, nor did I see him attend the same school as me, or even enter any of the houses around here. It was as if he didn't exist until I was vulnerable to the glistening of his teeth. He was incapable of real conversation. Any words, no matter how bitter or pleading, seemed to register to him. He would only ask questions, and I had an unstoppable compulsion to answer them, regardless of how humiliating they might be. His eyes didn't betray any sense of humor or smug superiority, instead only giving away a sense of primal hunger. "When was the last time that you pooped your pants?" I gulped, remembering that my bedwetting had started after a similar question a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to deny the monster his bread, but my lips would spew the answer without any real input from my brain; I could suddenly imagine the last time that it had happened, when I was six years old and had simply had an accident in my underpants. The shame had been so raw and defining; it was the type of core memory that could never be shaken from the building blocks of my history. "I was six, at the carnival. I ate too much and the line to the restroom was too long...I ended up pooping my pants pretty badly." The creature, wrapped in the skin of an ordinary little boy, licked its lips. It was almost like I could see him feasting on the sustenance of my memory, as if the emotionally drenched pieces of reality were enough to slake his thirst. I could suddenly feel a shift within myself, my soul able to comprehend the newest thread that had been unwound; the newest puzzle piece to be stripped from the board and gobbled up. Things were once again changing for me. I wrinkled my nose at the advent of a peculiar odor; it was familiar yet unexpected. I could then feel something... Hot. It was sticky, warm and pressed very tightly up against my backside, like a coiled spring. I let myself hazard a glance away from the predator in front of me, and looked downwards. Sticking out of the top of my khakis, I could see the blue waistband of a Pull-Up, just like the ones I had been made to wear to sleep in. I let one of my hands drift down too, cupping what I could now tell was a large, unsightly lump in the back of my shorts. I had soiled myself, and not even my underpants like the memory should have suggested; my timeline was becoming more tangled. As I began to look back up to meet Vincent's gluttonous gaze, he was already beginning to ask another question, uncaring that he'd turned me into a daytime pantspooper with just a handful of probing words. "How smart were you the last time you were in a messy pair of training pants?" This wasn't checkmate. Checkmate had been his from the very beginning, from the first question he'd ever asked. I'd only been made to suffer a prolonged battle for the sake of his sluggish metabolism. Now I was down to just scraps, and he planned to make sure that I'd be simple and easy to gnaw on for the last bits of my puzzle. What would be left of me when he was done? And where would he go? I was now a third grader who pooped in Pull-Ups, and my intellect was about to become much more limited at that; how much further would he go? What could possibly remain? Before I could answer his question, I felt my bladder release itself, and the front of the messy training pants began to swell with the warmth of my fear, before sagging unceremoniously between my legs. Perhaps I couldn't identify what type of monster or demon this little boy was, but I did know what he was. He was victorious, and I was but his prey.