Nathan Patton keeps it real, but also fictionalizes it. He lives in the Boston Mountains with his wife and guitar. His work has been published by Arcana, Speakeasy, and Young American Comics, and has been hung on many refrigerators.
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Respect (August 20, 2010. Issue 20.)
There
is
a boy on a school bus, and his head is against the window. The cold of
it put
him to sleep, but as the bus turns and bo unces, his head slams into the
glass
and it wakes him up. The girl next to him asks if he’s okay,
but he gives no
response, just murmurs like a machine.
The
girl’s mind drifts into memory-dance, until she hears a thin
but steady drip as
it softly splatters onto the rubber below her feet. It sounds like
someone
opening a peppermint wrapper.
She
turns
to see the boy, now sickly-white with splotches of red on his ears and
forehead, vomiting into the floorboard. The other kids on the bus soon
notice,
and they react as the children they are: they laugh and moan and point,
move as
far away from the boy (and by extension,
the girl) as possible, crowding three and four people in two-person
seats,
laughing, laughing, laughing.
The noise
and chatter catches the boy’s attention, and he looks up, his
mouth still
dripping bile and spit, and his eyes meet the girl’s shallow
gaze. She turns
away and closes her eyes, hearing the laughter and wondering if it will
ever
stop, but she doesn’t move. She stays right where she is. She
stays next to him
until he gets off at his stop and the driver comes back to pour a
special
powder on what he left. She stays. Out of respect. |