A Glimpse Into A Twisted Mind

I'm not always sure where my characters originate, but Brightstone quickly became a loved/hated character for me.   Perhaps because I understood his pain.

Take a glimpse into a twisted mind.

There was nothing exceptional about my birth, except perhaps for the fact that my parents shared the biblical names of Joseph and Mary. They were a good, God-fearing couple.

Alas, they did not name me Jesus, but their hopes for me were not in vain. They soon realized I was not a normal child. Not like the other five-year-olds. I cared not for toys and storybooks. I spent my time developing healing antidotes from ordinary shrubs. I cared for animals, birds with broken wings. It was not unusual for me to come home carrying a poor dog that had been run over by some careless motorist. I would spend hours stitching up their wounds, applying homemade poultices, and nursing them back to health. I was indeed a savior of sorts.

School was my first experience of the cold reality of being different. Like my parents, my teachers discovered that my mind was much further advanced than they could deal with. How could you teach a child whose mind was a sponge and whose knowledge, within days, exceeded your own? I did not know then how to hide my intelligence and fit in with a crowd. I did not know how to play the games of life and lose occasionally.

Soon it became apparent that our small community was not the best place for a child of such brilliance. Or at least that was what the men in white coats convinced my parents of. So the men took me away for my own good.

I had no best friends, no first dates, no senior proms. Nothing but a cold grey building, lab coats, and books. Lots and lots of books. Not the fun, frivolous stories I should have enjoyed in my youth. Textbooks of knowledge that I absorbed and mastered within days, weeks, and months. I graduated with honors. My parents, whom I had not seen in ten years, were in the front row, beaming with pride. I smiled at them, but there was no feeling behind my smile. Any memory of the warmth of my mother’s touch or the gentle yet firm guidance of my father’s hands had long ago been lost. My father was a stranger, an old man, still handsome in some ways, but the luster was gone from his eyes. My mother, once a spirit of light and life, seemed cold with her sweater wrapped around her thin shoulders, her beauty faded by time. Had their lives grown cold and loveless like mine?

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