Washed Away

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เนื้อเรื่องต้นฉบับ ต้นแบบของสู่อิสรภาพ โดยเป็นฉบับภาษาอังกฤษค่ะ

ลองอ่านดูเล่นๆ ได้น้า ความซับซ้อนของเรื่องน้อยกว่าสู่อิสรภาพเพราะยังเป็นเบต้าเวอร์ชั่นหนึ่ง

ไปลองเอ็นดูน้องกันได้จ้า XD

เนื้อเรื่อง

Washed Away

As soon as the sun went down and darkness took over, a teenage boy would be seen walking up from the lake at the far end of the forest. He was wearing a wet grey hooded T-shirt and bleached black shorts, the perfect color to blend in the dark, gloomy atmosphere of the forest.

Many people thought that death was a way out of miserable life, but they were wrong in one point. Only the peaceful death, as if you just fell asleep and woke up into the new world, would lead you to the rest in peace. Suicide, on the other hand, would simply imprison you in this world to repeat your tragic ending over and over again, even until you felt sick of it. This was one of the rules for the dead that the living never knew of. That was one of the reasons why there was still more and more stupid people committing suicide every single year as the newspaper called it "suicide rates skyrocket".

The teenage boy looked down at his soaking wet boot unaffected by the sticky mud it was treading on. He had always been in his adolescence even though ten years had passed since he drowned in the lake. One good point of suicide might be that if you died young, you would always be young. So if you died of car crash, you would remain blood-soaking, flesh ripped and face so hideous and unrecognizable. In this boy case, however, his skin would always look squashy and swelling with water leaking out from him forever as if he had absorbed all water in the world. His short black hair was always dripping wet and clinging to his narrow, tapered face. Paper would definitely melt at his touch. So when he saw an old newspaper on the mud, he had to sit down to have a closer look at it instead of picking it up.

The newspaper was two days old. Upon the front page, a sad-looking boy, no older than five years old, stared back at him. The boy was blond. His eyes were pale blue like the sea in the glaring sunlight of midday. He looked so drowsy that the teenage boy started wondering if the photo was taken when the little boy was just out of bed. 

With his pale drenched hand, he took hold of the newspaper. It was soften at the touch and soon dissolve into soggy, greyish blue substance mixing with mud. He put it into his mouth, feeling sick of doing so, and then swallowed it down with disgust. He felt like a walking trash can. Only if those stupid people would stop throwing away garbage everywhere they could, except into the garbage bin, he could stop this repulsive job. Without the job, he could be out of water just for a walk in the nice cool breeze before going back to sleep in his watery grave at the bottom of the lake, waiting for another sunset to revisit.

Suddenly, he heard a soft sobbing from somewhere, so soft that he did not notice the sound at first. He looked around and saw a small silhouette against the pale moonlight, quivering next to a dewy bush not so far from the lake. It was a boy, a little boy who looked exactly like the one he saw in the newspaper earlier except that he had bruises and cuts all over his skin that was not covered by cloth. Some cuts were still bleeding slightly while others were covered with scabs. All bruises had turned into a color between dark purple and deep blue, contrasting sharply with the boy's pale complexion.

He lumbered towards the sobbing boy, making the soft mud sink deeper at his every step. The little boy sensed a dark shadow moving towards his direction. He looked up with his big round teary eyes that looked like a puppy crying over the absence of its mommy, if puppy had ever actually cried. He felt like he wanted to protect the child, perhaps because the look in those eyes reminded him of his old self.

He sat right in front of the little boy, and smiled the kindest smile as he could. Then he realized that the last time he wore other expression besides annoyance or irritation seemed quite a long time ago. The little boy, scared at first, reached out his tiny, trembling hand to touch that smile; but winced as water seeped into many cuts on his hand. He did not pull away though. Still sobbing, the child watched the smile attentively as if he had never seen one before.

"Hey, little boy. Why are you crying? Are you lost? Where is your mommy?"

The smiling boy crouched down so he could look right into the child’s eyes at the same level, for this would make the blond less scared of him.

The younger boy, still looked scared anyway, shook his small head and said nothing.

"Where did you get all these cuts and bruises from? Did your mom hit you?"

This time he nodded, "Mommy hit me, but there were also big guys at school. They hit me. So Ms. Summers called my mom and she was really upset. So she hit me."

"Do you want me to hit your mommy for you? So she won't hit you anymore when she’s upset." 

"No! Don't hit her." the boy looked terrified. "I was hit because I was a bad boy."

"Then what can I do so you would stop crying?"

He did not answer and started to doubt the reasons for his melancholy.

After quite a long quietness, the younger one spoke again, "It hurts. Could you make the pain go away?"

Could he? The older boy wondered. He could melt things, as well as dissolved or flooded them. But for healing, he never tried before though, maybe he could. Maybe water could make the pain less painful. Wait. Didn't the boy wince before when he touched him? So basically, water would not help lessen the pain but rather make it worse. He was thinking hard, but couldn't come up with any solutions.

"How about..." he paused when the boy looked up at him with his depressing blue eyes, "I guide you out of the forest so you can go back..."

"No! Please! I don't want to go back," now he was crying even harder than before.

The watery boy signed, realizing his mistake. He JUST saw the boy in the missing list on the newspaper, didn't he? If not for abduction, probably the boy just ran away from his home due to some unknown problems.

"You should go back you know" the boy shook his head frantically, "Come on. It's not that bad. Your mom was upset but that was in the past. People can get upset sometimes but they will soon calm down. Same as your mom. She might be crying her eyes out because you ran away from home."

"I'm scared. I don't want to go back" he kept repeating what he said earlier. Seemed like the persuasion did not work, he changed the topic. 

"What is your name, little boy?"

"Edward," he replied timidly, "but mom always called me Eddy except when she's angry."

"OK Eddy, I can call you Eddy, right?" he nodded.

"You don't want to go back?" The boy shook his head. "How about you go live with me, what do you think?"

His expression became brighter. The boy smiled with eyes and cheek still wet with tears. He looked enthusiastic for all of a sudden.

"Do you live here? Is it good?"

The condition he literally lived in, ignoring the fact that he was no longer alive, was rather difficult to describe in just whether it was good or not. It was quite tormenting, actually; he had to keep the lake and the area around it as clean as he could, the payment for committing suicide. Although it was appalling to eat dirty garbage, it would not upset his stomach because he did not have one. Everything he ate would be like sinking into the deep lake, stayed at the bottom there, decomposed. But when it passed through him, the process would be a lot faster and had less effect upon the water of the lake. Because he did contaminate the lake by his dead body ten years ago, no surprises that the punishment for him now was to keep the lake spotless.

However, he would never want to go back being human again. He, like this boy, had been bullied for all his short life, at the orphanage where he lived and also at school. When he was human, he was a coward, weak and pathetic. He would rather stay lifeless in the lake and do the cleaning forever instead of rebirth into that petty creature ever again.

‘Not so good, but a whole lot better than being human.’ That was what he wanted to say but he did not want to scare the boy off by the fact that he was dead. So he just held out his wet, slick hand in front of the boy and said, "Come with me, I will show you."

Edward reluctantly grabbed the hand. But just when he stood up, he screamed.

"IT HURTS. HELP ME. HELP ME!"

Blood in immeasurable amount spurted out from the back of his head. As he burst into tears, his eyes turn red and the tears became muddy blood running through his cheek and stained half of his white T-shirt. The little boy shivered as blood flooded from his body and make him totter. The older boy rushed to support him, he held the smaller boy tightly in his arms. Blood was diluted in the larger amount of water unceasingly pouring out from the janitor of the lake and soon washed away all the thick ruddy liquid from the frightened boy. He could feel Edward leaning against his chest as if it was a soothing hug from his father whom he would never get another chance to see.

"It's okay now Edward. It's okay. It won't hurt anymore." The reassuring voice help calm the boy down. The taller boy smiled as he petted the younger boy’s hair soothingly. Then he noticed, just in the very bush the boy had been sitting near for all this time, lay the same boy with the same wounds. His eyes firmly shut with blood leaking from them, just like what had happened earlier.

"Do you want to come live with me, Edward?"

"Will the pain go away?" he asked innocently and received a broad grin back.

"All your pain will be washed away. Just come with me."

The boy looked happier than he had ever been in his whole life. He grabbed the hand, without hesitation this time. The strange boy was right. He did not feel the pain anymore as the two sank lower and lower into the depth of the lake, together. 

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