A Boy Named Gren

A boy named Gren. A beautiful, long limbed, willowy boy with wide eyes, a high smooth forehead, and a dirty blonde mop of tangled waves at constant war with gravity. A shy boy. Spirited and curious but terrifically shy. Quiet. Silent. He's a runner. He runs and runs and runs. A perpetual motion machine smelling of black licorice and bazooka gum, lemonade and peanut butter, and the earthy, pungeant odour of sweaty young boy. Wormy when the ground swells after sudden rain. Old wood crumbling into dust after years of age, splinters melting in his hands they're so soft from rot. Every day he makes up stories off the top of his head as he gallops through the trails of giant redwoods, scaling walls of verdant green moss, ducking under canopies of ferns and pine, imagining the backwoods his own private kingdom. He communicates with the birds and deer and frogs and spiders and tiny red squirrels and they animate his tales in play by play fashion. Gren can't tell who's leading who, the cardinal or him. His lips move delicately as he mouths words silently to himself, half formed, like a player rehearsing his lines. Then one day Gren begins to sing. Sound is pouring out of him. He feels like his head is about to explode. His seven year old brain is on overload, a kaleidoscope of light and sound. This is what imagination sounds like. What heart and eyes and pictures inside of his mind sound like. A panopoly of tones, vibrating from the bottom of his converse all the way through the top of his skull. He feels the music inside his body and finally brings it to rise, up and out, filling in the canopy of the forest, startling his own ears. Gren has never spoken. Seven years of silence and now he sings. The woods reverberate with his high clear voice, melodic, true. Beautiful music and a world of words are tumbling out like beads spilling from a broken chain. Released. Free. New beginnings have come.