joegoda | Pockets and the Wawful shoes.

He was hiding in the Library, and that was just fine with him. While the small brained and rough knuckled morons clunked around outside, he was safe. Let them search under bales of hay or boxes of rocks, intending to do him some sort of harm for whatever he was supposed to have done to them. It was quite likely nothing more than being intelligent and not a tree-climbing sloth-minded uni-browed pawn to genetics. He was safe, content, and well fed, word by yummy word, by an ancient tomb from before with the unwieldy title of 'The Architects of the Cosmos' by a gent named Armando D'alores.

Pockets could hear them, if he paid them any attention, which he didn't because he was flying across the universe. He could have heard them stomping and calling out his name, or at least the various names that they could articulate.

"Hey! Freak boy! Come out and play! We promise we won't hurt you... this time." That belonged to Freedy. A tall... well, taller than Pockets, any way, a tall, gangly punk, mean and feral in his eleventh year. He was as mean as any eleven year old could be, and that is pretty darn mean, considering that he was raised in the Leave Your Children Here Orphanarium.

That wasn't the Orphanage's real name, of course. It was actually called "Saint Charley's home for children." Nobody in recent memory called it Saint Charley's. Nobody in recent memory even remembered who Charley was or if he really was a saint or not. Even so, the two story, heavy stoned, dirty gray mortared building stood as the only place, the only home, such as it was, for the abandoned, the lost, the forgotten.

There weren't only children here. There were adults as well. Some had been afflicted by the 'Bads back in the days of the dark sun, when the Twin Mountains had burned far too bright from a crashing meteor and the sky had grown full and pregnant of ash and soot from thousands of acres of burning trees. There were those who said the Great Desert was created during that time.

The daylight hadn't shown clearly for nearly three years. Some folks can't quite handle that sort of dark for that long of time. Some folks ended their sad lives by their own hand. Some folks ended other folk's lives for them. And some folks were ended because they ended other folk's lives.

Some folks just went crazy and wandered into places like Leave Your Children and stayed, weird old shadows of real people, wandering through hallways and showing up when they were least expected. They were all harmless, these ethereal living spectors, because all of the ones that weren't harmless were helped out the door of life in one form or fashion. Now a-days, that job, when that job was required, fell upon a rather large, rather hairy, rather muscular individual that everyone called 'Big Mike'. It was an unspoken duty of Big Mike's to handle all sorts of nastiness that involved the explaining with extreme prejudice the reality of the situation involving the harming of children. Big Mike would even explain this to adults who weren't even crazy, but just merely violently stupid, or stupidly violent.

Well, not everyone, actually, called him 'Big Mike'. Pockets called him Mister Everret. He called him this because Big Mike's last name was Mister Everret, and since Big Mike had saved Pockets life one time or another, Pockets decided that he should show a bit of respect, as it were. And so, Pockets called Big Mike Mister Everret, and that was just fine with both of them.

Pockets was born sometime during the near permanent winter of the days of the dark sun when the world was cold and frozen and covered with snow or ash, or snow and ash. It was a dark night when the young boy was left on the doorsteps of the Orphanage, alone and crying. He wasn't more than a few months old, but he was already aware enough of the world outside himself to know that he had been, to not put too fine a point on it, dumped.

“Hmph,” thought baby Pockets, whose name at that time wasn't really Pockets, and, in matter of fact didn't have a name yet, “if this is the way the world is, then I'll just crawl inside myself and that's where I'll stay.”

And he did, on that cold ashy-snowy night, bundled in a patchwork quilt that was mostly rags. No basket. Just the quilt, thick and mouldy, barely hanging together by the threads it was hardly stitched with. He shut up inside himself and hid away.

Of course, he was a baby, even so. Baby's attention span is something akin to a absent minded gnat, and oddly, his attention span didn't grow a whole lot better as he got older. So, in about a minute, maybe five, he started to scream at the top of his lungs.

“I'm cold, I'm hungry, and I'm really, seriously needing a change out of whatever thing is that's wrapped around my hips, if that's what they are. I mean, really. This is just nasty!”

He said all this in the currently language of his age, which can roughly be described as rolling a neighborhoods worth of aluminum trashcans full of rabid cats down a steep grade of loose gravel. He was a baby, after all. He hadn't heard of the ABCs, vowels or even been hooked on phonics, yet.

The massive wooden doors of the Orphanage creaked open, and a long sliver of golden light spilled out onto the stone steps where the baby was yowling. He wasn't crying, he was yowling, yowling like the seven hells wouldn't have it, yowling to make bobcats jealous and cause caribou to go rutting. The man who opened the door, old and stooped from years of bending over to pick up toddlers from this very same doorstep, was carrying a broom to shoo away whatever rabid cat had found a home on his doorstep.

“By the Seven Hells!” said the old man, shaking his broom, “Get thee away, you felinus foulness!” The ring of hair that ran from ear to hairy ear was tufted up so that, with the light behind him, he looked be-haloed. The top of his head was bald and shiny and his eyes were hidden behind tiny square glasses.

The baby didn't know it, but he was looking at the image of himself, once he got old enough to have a bald head and hairy ears. No, this wasn't some sort of wacky time travel trick. It's just that most short men go one of two ways. Old men are either bald and skinny and cranky, or bald and fat and cranky. The old men that keep their hair usually turn remarkably silver and dashing and end up having diminutive side-kicks who can't pronounce the word 'the', or they become mad scientists that continually have their schemes fouled by a group of young and improbably stupid teenagers.

The old man jumped back with a start when he saw the bundle of rags sitting on the stone stoop. “Good grief, Mary and Joseph!”, he said. “Someone has gone and wrapped a rabid cat in a bunch of rags. I'd be yowling too, if it was me.”

Gently he poked at the bundle, unwrapping it layer by layer until the cherubic face of a baby screamed up at him.

“What the...?” He scratched his head and pushed his spectacles up to his forehead. “Tain't a cat at all! It's a baby.” Gently he reached down and picked up the quilted bundle. Stroking the baby's forehead, the old man smiled with all three of his teeth and said “SHUT UP!”
And, not surprising, the baby did. He knew when he had met his match.

“Good,” said the old man, whose name was Joseph Chesterson. “Now, let's see if we can get you fed, get you changed and get you warmed up.” He turned away from the door. “Probably not all in that order, though.”

That fateful night was eleven years ago. Eleven long, long, painful, years ago. The baby, who was named Chester Joseph at the Orphanage by the man who had found him as a form of reverse immortality, grew and grew and then stopped. At the approximately eleven years old, he just stopped. Granted, five feet six inches wasn't bad for an eleven year old, and although Chester Joseph didn't know it, that was as far as he was going to grow.

The downside is that the other eleven year old boys were five feet eight inches or even taller. And such it was that Chester Joseph became the object of their short temper. All pun intended.

The name of Pockets came about when the boy was eight, and as a curious sort of boy, poking and probing into everything, he tended to carry his entire life in his pockets. All manner of doo-dads, thingagummies, small rocks and bits and pieces of shiny that caught his eye and his imagination went into his pockets. One of the women working at the Orphanage made him a pair of trousers that had three pockets on each leg.

“There, young man!”, she said proudly, “let's see how fast you can fill these up!”

Chester Joseph took exactly one half hour to accomplish that task.

It must be said that most of the staff at the Orphanage had not earthly idea of how to handle a boy like Chester Joseph. He was too smart for his own good, they said. He would ask questions that none of them knew how to answer, they said. He's bound to end up in trouble with the way he would just latch onto something and forget that he even picked it up, they said. Bring back that Screwdriver, or there will be hell to pay, they said.

The librarian, who was a wonderful woman named Betty Brown, had a special place in her heart for the boy. She had thousands of books that had been donated by one of the originals... one of the 'Firsts'... that detailed any manner of things that she was certain would never be read or even needed by anybody for the next thousand years. These were books that had come from the time before. Before the planet, that is. When people lived on that far away and fantastical place called Arth.

There were books that spoke of anything from Astronomy to Zoology, from Zither playing to Ant farming and from Aardvark herding to Zoroastrianism. These books were called Cyclopedias, and there were books that talked about small things, like words. There were books on science and medicine and mechanical things and artistic things and musical things and... well, it was there, whatever it might be.

Over the three decades that Betty Brown had been in charge of the library, there had been less than a handful, which means five, because a handful is five fingers, there had been less than five people who had looked at, much less read, any of the books on the shelves.

And now, this curious boy, this Chester Joseph, this enigma who didn't go out and terrorize the cows in the field, or monsterize the other children or pull down garden walls... this boy, with is weak baby blue eyes and hard set to his mouth was reading, no she corrected herself, he devoured whatever his eyes and hands fell to. His mind seemed an empty well, waiting to be filled, and filling it was.

“What are you?”, she would muse quietly from behind her desk and under her tight gray bun of hair. “Are you making up for lost time? Are you preparing for something that you and only you know is coming?”

She would sometimes sigh and rise from where she sat behind her heavy wooden desk, hearing the chair screech almost as loudly as her knees were popping, and she would cross over to where the boy sat, his face barely inches away from the pages, his lips moving silently as he read, his eyes darting across the page as if he was chasing the words and was afraid they would slip away.

“Chester?” She spoke quietly, not just because this was a library, but because it was her habit. “Chet?” and when the boy would finally look up from his page, she would be struck by how tightly closed his face was. It always took a few minutes for him to recognize her and to come back from wherever it was he was lost in.

“Don't you think you should go, you know...”, she paused thinking. “Go outside and play? With the other children, I mean?”

Chester Joseph would then look up at a spot above her and far away to his left. He would stare the something that wasn't there for a while, and then his eyes would drift to the right, as if reading a large and universally posted page somewhere in the air.

“No, I don't think so, Miss Brown.” His voice, still boyishly high, carried a hint of the depth of his soul, she thought. “You see, I have nothing in common with those children out there. They have no thought, no mind, no concept of a future or anything beyond their tiny little lives.”

He held up the book he had been reading. She squinted down at the title. “A Brief History of Time?”, she murmured. “Time is history.” She looked down at the boy, who was smiling in a sympathetic manner. “Isn't it?”

“Well,” said the boy, confidently, “time as we know it is neither history or future. All we know, all we can know, is the now. The tiny slice of what is happening at this very moment. Anything else is memory, which starts fading almost as soon as it's created. The future is most assuredly another matter altogether. The future can be predicted, but that simply involves the calculation of what is known and extrapolating the possible outcomes based upon know parameters. In fact, concepts such as history and the future are all illusionary anyway, since they don't have any true basis in reality and are only subjectively experienced. In fact, you and I are mere shadows to each other, Miss Brown. You only know me as a subjective construct of memory, granted very recent memory, and you can only suppose you know me or anything about me, simply because nothing I have done and nothing I will do is completely based in fact. It has been, and it will be, pure memory or speculation.”

“I see.” Betty Brown took a slow stepped away from the boy, although she felt the strongest desire to pick him up from the floor and hug him, tight. He scared her and, at the same time, set her maternal instincts a fire. 'What sort of parents did this boy have, to have created something so.... odd. '

“Chester”, she asked one day, with a soft voice and a slightly sad smile, “don't you ever get lonely?”

A look of puzzlement crossed his face. “Lonely?” He screwed his face up in pondering. “I suppose that I sometimes do, but I don't exactly recognize the feeling as such. I've been alone, surely.” He paused again, in thought. “And I have my very good friend, Timothy!” A slight smile crept back to his face. “So, no, Miss Brown, I don't get lonely. Not truly.” For a moment, he frowned. “What I do wish for is someone to talk to, to discuss my thoughts and findings with. If there was something to cause me to be lonely, that's what it would be. I have no one to talk to.” He sighed. “Ah well. I'm sure as I get older, this will change, don't you?”

“I hope so,” she said.

Miss Tindle worked in the kitchen, making lunches and breakfasts and dinners. She'd whip up some godly desserts and some heavenly sandwiches. She was a magical entity in the kitchen, and for Chester, she was something of a wonder, as she didn't shun the boy. In fact, she was a welcome addition to his life, because she was, considering the time and place, well read, and had a rudimentary concept of physics.

“It comes from being a cook, I imagine.”, she'd say to him. “We not only have to understand some of this chemistry you talks about, but also how it all falls together, don't you see? I'm just as soon smell a thing and taste a thing and feel a thing, way, way before I makes it. I would never, ever make something that my brains tell me wouldn't look good, or taste good or smell good. I know, instinctively, don't you see, how a thing would be, before I makes it.”

Chester would spend some hours in the kitchen talking with Miss Tindle about this and that and another thing. He would just as easily spend hours in the kitchen making the place better than it could have been without him. He improved the water pump and came up with a filter system that cleaned the water and made it taste less like a swamp. He devised a hood over the old wood-burning oven so that the airflow of the kitchen itself would pull the smoke away from the room and keep smoke smell and soot from falling over everything. He came up with a more efficient way of combining the oven and the cook top so that the heat was more evenly distributed, because, he said, “I hate having my pancakes burned on just one side.”

One thing that he pondered about was using the heat of the oven to drive a cooling system. According to something that he had read, he should be able to use the heat to drive a system of compression that would, apparently magically, draw the heat of the system away, leaving only cold. It was something he filed away to be looked at later.

There was one more thing in the kitchen that drew the boy's attention. Miss Trindle had a niece, or as close to niece as could be got. An orphan girl, named Betsy, worked in the kitchen often. She was a pretty little girl with a button nose and long brown hair that parted easily in the middle. Her eyes, also brown, were soft and made people think of puppies. She had long gangly limbs that seemed to offer a future promise once everything settled out on her womanly body.

Chester had no idea what it all meant. He just knew he liked to look at her, he liked to be around her, and he liked to hear her voice. His heart beat a little harder when he was around her, and his mouth went dry. He didn't even mind that he couldn't think straight or make a coherent sentence around her. Though he didn't know it and wouldn't admit it even if he did, he was in the throws of emotion.

Still, he was beset by the evils that befall any short, overly intelligent boy. Picked upon by his peers, poked at by his elders, Chester took refuge in the library, in the kitchen, in the company of those he felt most comfortable with. His friend Timothy, Betsy the kitchen orphan, Miss Trindle and Miss Brown. And there was Old Joseph Chesterson, who had treated the boy like the father he had never known.

“Hmmm.” Old Joseph, being wise in his way and smarter than he looked, took note of the boy's curiosity and propensity to stuffing everything in his pockets. He was aware of the effect that the boy had on other adults and how the other boys teased without mercy this son that he never had. It was one day that Joseph found Chester pulling an entire tool kit out of one of his many pockets that he said, “I think, Chet,” he said in his very creaky voice, the voice that only very creaky old men can have, “that it's time we found you a last name, and I think you already did.”

In a ceremony that rarely took place at the Orphanage, a ceremony generally reserved for when a child was adopted, Chester Joseph Nobodyinparticular became Chester Joseph Pockets.

And because the Universe is full of iron, there happened to be another boy, who was quiet and private, and never, ever caused much trouble, and who also received a name on that day. This boy, Timothy, was the one that kept Chet Pockets from running around with a bloody nose most of the time, and kept Chet Pockets' hair from having that 'just swirlyied' look. They were the best of friends, stuck together through thick and thicker and how that happened is another story for another time. This story is Pocket's story.

And so, back to the now of way back then and the here of where it was back there.

"Yeah, really. We promise! No cistern dunking. No swirlies. Really! Honest injun!"