Work in Progress

[castorlion.livejournal.com]

Here, on the first page of our story, a simple line sketch of ink, dark against the rich yellowish page. It's a man, sitting alone. Perhaps the illustrator is heavy-handed and he is initially in a funeral parlour, or by a graveside; perhaps the simplicity of it is a genius of its own, and his grief is shown in line of slumped shoulder and bowed head. He is likely shown in a family home, but one that is shadowed, overcast by something too terrible to speak of, and horribly, terribly empty.

The second page shows us a boy. He is young, perhaps too young to fully grasp the enormity of what has happened. He only knows that one vital part of his life has been suddenly and inexplicably taken from him, and the other.. well, here is another picture. The man, and the boy. They are not touching. The boy stands, staring pleadingly at where the man sits. The man stares off into the shaded gloom, unseeing.

Unlike the father's pictures, the pictures of the boy that follow are firmly outlined and emphasised with blocks of ink, pools of blackness and hard scratchings at the paper. The boy, with flushed screwed-up face, tries to fill the empty void with temper, but the gloom is unyielding.

The next page is filled with scratchy drawings that are almost painful to look at, sketching as they do time filled with anger and alienation. Even the man is roused, in one of the pictures, to confront a screaming, red-faced monster of a child. A near empty picture overlapping the scenes of anger shows both man and boy standing, frozen into near-immobility; even the boy is shocked out of his temper by the monstrous words that he has just screamed, words that cannot ever be unsaid.

A final picture on the page shows the boy, curled up on the floor of his room, using anger and defiance in the way that the young do against guilt and remorse. The viewer might be forgiven for imagining that perhaps the words the boy spoke in anger hang heavy in the silence around him. He is surrounded by the gloom pervading the house, and he is completely, utterly alone.

A few, small pictures greet the person that turns the next page. The man sitting in the gloom unmoving. A change in position and a look of some confusion. The man mounting the stairs, confusion giving way to alarm. The man looking across an empty bedroom in horror at the billowing curtain, and wide open window with a knocked-over table beneath it emblazoned with a single footprint. The final picture is the view looking down at the boy, sprawled unmoving on the unforgiving ground.

A double page spread is filled with small pictures, curved and running rapidly into each other. It's not possible to see the full details, but who needs to? There is a hospital, and one would assume that the boy is lying on the table with those doctors clustered thickly around him; here is the man, pacing frantically and promising who knows what to who knows what if the boy on the table will only be whole again. There are pictures indicating a long recuperation, and as the pictures grow smaller and more distant from the viewer, they show a reconciliation and an emotional healing. The boy grows, and becomes a man. He is no longer angry, or sullen. He is polite and considerate, a dutiful son. Almost a different person. Changed.

And if the pictures are faint, and perhaps not so real as they could be, who is likely to notice? Small differences, even major changes - they are the result of trauma, after all. A life-changing experience, people say.

Turn the page.