Free Bleak History by John Shirley Page B

you were part of something bigger, locked into a kind of family. A tough, ritualized, formalized masculine family. They had to accept you, if you did your job. Even if they sensed something was strange about you.
    He never felt really fully connected to his parents. Not after his brother vanished. And after that day, two days past his turning thirteen, he hadn't felt accepted by them at all.
    He went to church with his parents—there were devout Lutherans—but never felt a connection there, either. Not the kind other people felt. Feeding a new calf with a bottle, that gave him a feeling of connection. And there was that other connection, to the unseen, that was on the edge of his awareness...tingling there. Not coming into focus. Not till that night.
    That night in October, Gabriel Bleak, a boy of thirteen, lay atop his bedclothes, still dressed except for his shoes, trying to read Spenser, The Faerie Queene, for extra credit at school—Miss Williver, his English teacher, had talked him into it. He was surprised that he liked it. He was just lying there reading the part that went
     
    And forth he cald out of deep darknes dredd
    Legions of Sprights, the which, like little flyes
    Fluttering about his ever-damned hedd
    Awaite whereto their service he applyes,
    To aide his friendes or fray his enemies...
     
    And it gave him a peculiar feeling, reading those lines. Out of deep darknes dredd legions of Sprights. Not a feeling of dread, himself, but a sense of recognition both thrilling and unnerving.
    He wished he had someone he could talk to about that. Other kids worried about talking about sexual feelings. The Bleaks bred animals, and there wasn't much mystery there. These other sensations troubled him. That tingling around the edges. Something's there, unseen. Waiting.
    He found himself drifting into a familiar fantasy of talking to his brother. Who was gone, dead ten years now. But now and then, he liked to pretend his brother was there to talk to. He imagined saying, “Hey, Sean, I wish you could read this book, it gives me this feeling like the stuff that's so...that I can feel but I don't know what it is. Gives me those moments where I feel like if I'm somebody else than what people think, like that might still be okay. Like it's part of this world. Faerie, he calls it. He makes it seem like it's its own world and part of this one too. Not that I'm a fairy, dude, but...there's something there, it's like he knew...”
    He caught himself. Stop doing that! Dumb to pretend. Man, you 're just a dweeb with an imaginary friend. He wished he had a real, living brother or sister. He had a few faint memories of that other boy, his fraternal twin. Fainter every year since Sean had been killed, so his dad had told him, when they were not yet three. Some accident Gabriel hadn't witnessed. His folks were vague about it. A tractor. The boy playing unseen under the wheels.
    Anyway he was gone, and Gabriel was used to that. But there was an absence in his life, an absence he could feel physically, at times. If Sean had lived, Gabriel would have had a sibling with, perhaps, the same feeling of being undefmedly different. Someone who could relate to feeling as if yows had only one foot in this world. But death had taken Sean before his brother had quite understood Sean was really there as an individual. Gabriel had accepted him as part of the world like the furniture, the sky, the ground underneath, his own left hand. And then he was gone.
    Sure, Gabriel had some friends—a couple of others who seemed a little “off were drawn to him. Chester and Anna Lynn. Drawn to him, maybe, because he accepted them; maybe too because he sometimes protected them. And there were a couple of Indian brothers, off the Rez. Joel and Angelo, he'd see them at the rodeo, at the county fair, or on the street when Gabriel rode his bike into town. They hung out and talked, sometimes.
    But he never felt there was anybody he could really open up to. How would he