The TV was blaring from the other room, pulling at Mat’s concentration. He wanted so much to silence the thing, or just to yell at someone to turn it down, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the page before him. His hands moved like lightning, so fast he wasn’t entirely sure that it was his own brain that was directing them. They seemed to have a will of their own: his right hand making long stokes on the page and his right hand turning the sketchbook this way and that to make it easier to fill in the details of the drawing.
It was for these moments that he lived. For in these moments he looked down at his hands and saw power, purpose, even beauty. In these moments he looked down at his hands and he was glad that they were different from everyone else’s ungainly hands. Only when he was making beautiful things with these hands, things that everyone could admire, did he feel comfortable in his own skin.
His hands came to a sudden stop and Mat looked down and the drawing, turning it this way and that in the half-light of the evening to make sure it was perfect. Satisfied, he signed the bottom right corner with the usual angular letters: MaT.
And then the spell was broken and he looked down at his hands and they were not white and not brown, but a frustrating in-between. He stood abruptly, setting the sketchbook down and staring at his reflection. Beneath the yellow dye he could still see the dark hair that he had tried to hide from the world. It had not made a difference; today, like every first day of school, they had looked at him and seen someone that they wanted to banish back to a different world.
“Mahmoud!” his mother’s voice floated up the stairs, “Come here and help me tidy up for dinner!”
He dragged his feet down the stairs and headed for the kitchen, but he could not get past the living room. His father had collapsed tiredly into an armchair and taken control of the television. A breathless reporter stood before the site of the latest scene of devastation. This time it was a helicopter crash nearby.
“The helicopter was bringing home a group of young soldiers,” the reporter said, “Three of them are said to have been injured and one of them was coming home on leave to see his mother for the first time in years.”
Pictures of the soldiers came up on the screen. The last one was of a tall, muscular young man named Jeremiah.
Mahmoud noticed something haunted in the man’s eyes before the picture was replaced by the reporter’s face once more.
“We have no official statements from the Military or the police at this time, but what we do know from our own coverage of the scene of the accident is that none of the young men have been found alive and the scale of the destruction has made it unlikely – according to doctors on site – that the bodies will be recovered.”
Flames seemed to jump out of the screen and onto the living room carpet. Mat swung his head around wildly, but his father did not seem to have noticed. He turned back to the carpet and sure enough, weird purplish flames were licking at the air there, but they seemed somewhat less substantial – more transparent – than everything around them. A tiny toy fire-truck came zooming towards the flames, accompanied by Liam’s play siren noises.
Mat made a warning noise deep in his throat, but the young boy continued to play, pulling out the little plastic fire-hoses and shooting a stream of wispy, transparent water at the flames. They died down slowly leaving a weird insubstantial ash on the carpet which the boy pushed away delightedly. “Cool!” he whispered.
“Liam!” Mat’s sister Jasmine called from the doorway,
“Mum made a plate of fatayer for you to take home with you.”
Liam turned around and he noticed the direction of Mat’s gaze. Their eyes locked and each of the boys knew that the other had just witnessed the exact same daydream or illusion or hallucination or whatever it was. It was as if a gateway had opened to another, frightening world.
Mat shook his head and tried to force a smile, but he was not sure that it was successful. He held out a hand and Liam put his tiny pale one into it and pulled himself up.
“Hey, Mahmoud,” Liam said staring down at Mat’s large, dark hand, “Can you help me make a card for my Mum’s birthday?”
“Sure, kid,” Mat replied, wondering why little nine year old Liam could look down at his hands and see the hands of the artist when no one else could.
