The Spectaculars (Part 3)

Fiction by Oliver Cassidy
Author of The Spectaculars (Part 2)



Trent's five years old and spends most of his time in his room, drawing pictures that always make me feel like abstract art's a farce. It's been debated whether children's art's actually art. My two cents says it isn't. If it is, then Trent's art's probably art. He's undeniably talented. He's careful about the colors he chooses and tests them on scrap paper before he uses them in his pictures. I don't know much about kids in general, but I'm pretty sure most kids don't do that. He keeps his pens and pencils neatly in a box, laying out three or four colors at a time and replacing each one as he finishes. What's eerie is once he puts a color back in his box, he never uses it again for the same picture. His precision's unnerving. He draws his pictures in colored stages: first, say, everything yellow - the sun, a banana that winds up in a bowl on a picnic table, some spots on a bumblebee - then everything brown (like tree bark, ovals that eventually turn into airborne footballs in the distance, dog poop), etc. He's like a human photomat, manually developing images from his brain, one color at a time, with his neatly groomed little fingers. Kim thinks it's amazing. I think it's weird, abnormal.

When I finally got around to speaking with him about what'd happened with this Joey kid, he was in his room drawing what looked like naked, trombone-playing dancers. He didn't look up when I entered his room, so I tapped his head and said "Hey bud."

"Hello." Another unnerving aspect of his personality - his formality. Just with me though, not with Kim.

"Your mom told me about your fight. You good?"

"That was two days ago." Still no look.

"Let me see your eye."

"I'm using it right now." Little wiseass. He put some finishing touches on the outline of one of the trombones with a black pencil. He had all the details right: the valves and the sliding thing and the mouthpiece. I was impressed, but I couldn't get myself to ask how he knew how to draw so well, or why he was drawing trombones and dancing naked people; I just didn't care - I still don't. I just wanted the facts about the fight and to get the hell out of his room. He looked past me to show me his eye: scraped by the eyebrow, small bruise, no big deal. I had zero urge to touch his face, no urge to comfort him or adjust his head to take a closer look. I just stared at his eye for what felt like the right amount of time and told him it wasn't so bad.

"I know," he said.

"What's with the naked people?" I couldn't help myself.

"They're the Spectaculars."

"The whats?"

Trent sighed. "I'd like to finish this up."

You and me both, I thought. The thing about our relationship-



"Tell me about the Spectaculars," she said. I could tell she hadn't finished the story - she stopped in the middle of a sentence.

"You should keep reading," I said. "You're getting to it."

"I'd like to hear it from you. Plus, we're about out of time."

I knew I'd be leaving and never coming back, so I grabbed a framed art postcard from her desk and chucked it out the window. Felt nice. A great, quiet victory for childish insubordination. She didn't react, but I knew she wanted to, and that felt nice too. So then I did what I knew I'd do - I left and never came back. Paying someone to listen sucks. “Plus, we're about out of time.” Oh yeah? Go fuck yourself.

Stupid writing exercise. That's one of the main reasons I've always hated writing. Getting endings right. Endings never seem right.

The Spectaculars - they were supposed to be these really happy people; fictional happy people; irritating figments of the narrator's son's imagination; figments representing some sort of unreachable happiness or something. I was trying to write something about the human condition. About everyone, not just me. I was trying to get fancy; didn't really have it worked out. And what the fuck? Why should I? I'm not a professional writer. I dabble. And I don't hate my kid, and I'm nothing like the narrator of the story. I'm a fucking happy guy. That stupid bitch should've realized it.