Hope Valley Hubcap King

TINY BLUE MOONS He was no more than a child when the unreality of the world began to impress itself on him. His earliest memories were of moments when perspective went out of kilter, and foreground and background shifted without warning. Once, during a picnic at the waterfront, his mother bent forward to pass a plate of quartered dill pickles, and the river behind her appeared to freeze in place, while its banks drifted upstream. Another time, as he ambled along a city sidewalk holding his father's hand, the cars seemed to glide to a halt, while the buildings coasted along behind as though on an unseen conveyor belt. On one occasion he spent an entire afternoon staring into his reflection in a neighbor's fish pond. "My face, Daddy," he cried, as his parents finally led him away, "I could stick my hand through it. I could drink it!" He'd wriggled about so much in the womb his mother finally complained to her obstetrician: "Doc, can't you give him tranquilizers or something? My insides feel like a jungle gym!" Once he learned to crawl he roamed the house ceaselessly, up and down stairs, in and out of closets, cabinets, the basement. A moment's inattention by his mother and he was gone; following a panicked search, she'd find him in the cellar, staring at a spider building its web, or a scrap of insulation that had come loose from the pipes and drifted to and fro with every draft. After he began to walk he struck off for wider territory. Out a window, through a door left ajar; once his father found him teetering at the edge of a bluff overlooking the river, face jutting into the wind like the figurehead on the prow of a ship. A family friend remarked that the child had all the quickness and agility of a greyhound. The resemblance did not stop at that; for he was long and lean-limbed, with streamlined, forward-pointing features, and the way the hair swept back from his brow gave the impression of constant motion. "And those eyes," the friend cooed. "So blue and round, like little moons. Tiny blue moons, I do declare!" He'd been christened Frederick G. Brown II, but from the time of his birth he was known, for no reason anyone could ever ascertain, as Bibi. "Pronounced BB," his mother explained to doctors, teachers, and anyone else who balked on seeing the name in print. "You know, like the gun." One morning in his fifth year, Bibi was skating in his socks across the kitchen floor when he collided with a kettle of scalding water his mother was taking off the stove--an event that caused his already wide eyes to open wider than ever and which, his mother later claimed, caused their blue color to deepen permanently by several degrees. The child was left with a nasty burn on the back of his left wrist; and in the next days he did little but stare at it. It was as though by peering into his wound Bibi was seeing, for the first time, into himself. He gazed for hours into that translucent pink expanse, imagining the intricate workings of blood cells and capillaries, and wondering in his childish way: Is this all I am? "Bibi," his mother told him, "go out and play! It's not normal to sit around all day staring at that thing!" But her words had no effect. The burn eventually healed, leaving him with a mark shaped roughly like the continent of Australia, and the child resumed his wandering ways--but for years after, whenever he was worried or unable to sleep, Bibi's parents would find him sitting in the corner of his bedroom, staring into the roughened, puckered surface of his scar, and rubbing his fingers across it again and again. Bibi's dawning perception of the world's unreality was accompanied by a deepening sense of the strangeness of time. The Fourth Depression had reached its lowest ebb by the time he entered school, and whenever he and his mother drove inMurphy, Sean is the author of 'Hope Valley Hubcap King' with ISBN 9780385337823 and ISBN 0385337825.