Jimmy’s mother, distressed at her son’s sudden
declaration of moodiness, leans across the peas and
potatoes au gratin, rests her hand lovingly atop her
son’s, and inquires, caringly alarmed and perturbed:
“Sad and lethargic?! You?! Why?”
(little Jimmy gets a look on his face assuming an accumulation of years and experience far more vast than his 13 years substantiate, his face stony, sullen, greyed in a gesture of knowing, wear, of longing, like a cragged, hardened,wizened sea captain recalling at once both his star-crossed lover, the open sea, and the wee lass Katherine whose love he sacrificed and left behind for
the sole solace of the open briny blue. He gets that long, searching, distant look in his eyes, corneas focused almost drunkenly somewhere undefined in the near distance, opens the cobwebbed windpipes to his adolescent lungs, and scratches out, (in the nearest approximation to an “old- sea-captain-chantee-grizzle” voice he could muster while maintaining the aura of extreme emotional strife and suppressing the overall hilarity of the impression, however emotionally truthful and direct it may have been)
- - -- “twENTY-FOUR YEEEAAARSSSSssss...
“twENTY fOUR YEEEAAARSSSSssss(!) and nary a
woman has ventured to touch my penis...
“a long time, that; . . .”
(taking a bitter, cringing sip
of his shot of apple juice)
“whole PLAnets have DIED in less time.”