Off Center Walter Hobbs

The coal smudges that never wash out, the wiped nosebleed drying into a faint dark line above his lip, years before he would grow a mustache none of the other numbered boys ever lived long enough to have. He's looking up like a martyred saint in an old painting; pained, resigned, not heroic. His face lit by high up or by a warning crystal whose light you can't tell is falling from above or rising from his own hands. And he isn't looking at the crystal. He's looking past it. The warm red of living blood against the cold blue/purple (cyanosis) of the ghostly hands belonging to those who never saw the crystal's light and fell before the first beep. The weight of that notion is still crushing him, why them and not me? These are not malevolent hands, they have their own glow, they clutch at him not to drag him down, but to hold him (though it also feels as if they hold onto him). He is only a number here. No name yet. This is before he would find one in the story of a slave who led a rebellion and decided to carry that name forward. Tattered cloth slipping from his shoulders, blue and brown worn into muddy, exhausted, gray.

He is still a child here, barely held together.