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I was fixing our wooden platform one day when we arrived at a town in the eastern coast called Nab'kfir, when the kid approached me. At first he just looked. And then offered to help by holding the platform while I hammered.
"Business is bad", he said finally. I stopped what I was doing and looked at him. He then avoided my gaze, took the hammer from my hand and continued pounding the half-buried nail.
"Well, yes. If that's how you put it", I answered almost reluctantly, shaking my ears hoping my earwaxes hadn't developed any evolutionary trait we often called talking. There would be a deep silence if not for the repeated pounding into the platform.
"I could help." It took me too long to realize that he actually spoke sentences of more than one word. I was just looking at him while he pounded nails into the platform. In some cultures it can be called a shock. But I guess I was just amused to hear the boy speak. It was one of those rare moments I guess and I'm not prepared how to react when confronted with such alternative reality.
"I... well... what can you do?", I said finally when I realized that the silence was too long for such a sensible conversation. Want to know what I was thinking at that moment? My mind wanted to grab something to write on. I know I can rely heavily on my memory but at that point I felt it might fail on me and unable to record what's he gonna say. I'm not exaggerating. It's just a mere fact.
"I can laugh". Yes,of course, I thought, I bet you can but what good it can do to us? And he continued, "Among your audience."
It dawned to me then what he wanted to do. It also became clear what's bugging me ever since he talked that day. It seems that he limits or splits his sentences into three words this time and he's quite good at sticking to his acquired convention. I wonder how long he could keep at that. And I couldn't wait a year to actually hear him utter a hundred-word sentence. It's quite artistic really. Haiku's boring. I mean c'mon, you've got 5-7-5 and that's it.
"You mean you want me to plant you among the audience... and you...sort of...persuade them to laugh?"
He inserted some recognizable nods in between his hammering. Ha!, I thought, run out of 3-word sentences you there, sport.
"That's...quite interesting.", I muttered. "but I don't see anything very plausible to believe that you can actually convince people to laugh. Y'see people don't laugh just because you laughed. There has to be a laughable medium which conveniently points back to me and the stories I would tell them. That's just how exactly this kind of stuff works."
The boy didn't reply. If you happened to look at him intently at that moment, it was as if he was deeply absorbed by what he was doing. I was half-expecting he would eventually notice me, stop his hammering, and blurt out, Sorry what did you just said?
But of course that was a six-word sentence and I don't think he was ready to take that drastic step up on his literary word-play.
I was running out of patience which is, by the way, a very limited supply, so I broke the silence, "Okay, so tell me, how'd you gonna do that exactly."
He stopped whatever he was doing and took a better look at the mountain range in our horizon. The receding sun shone a bright but confused expression on his face.
"I don't know."
I sighed. Gathered the disoriented tools around me into a much more disoriented toolbox. I glanced at the disoriented boy one more time and it's not very impossible I could get very disoriented myself someday.
"I can't explain."
"Of course you can't...because there's none. Really." I mean don't get me wrong. I don't see any sign of humor in that boy's bones. Even without Grete burning to ashes, Norman was... Norman the timid. It was made worse by the incident at Grete of course.
"Let me try."
It was a piercing look. There's a certain look in his eyes that made all the swords in the world a friendlier foe. No, it wasn't anger. It was just... strange really. There was infinity beyond that black iris. Uncomfortable wasn't the right word. But I guess there wasn't a right word after all.
I snapped back just in time before that infinity consumed me. "Do whatever you've got. You're a persistent one, so you are." I let out a short laugh. "Now can you bring this tools inside the wagon and go see Ambrocia if there's any help she may need."
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