What you're about to hear is based on actual events.

Listener discretion is advised.

Jean-Claude stairs blankly out from his living room window and into the forest.

The grandfather clocked behind him in unison with the blood dripping from the rolling pin.

He is lost in the trees, a child again.

These are the same woods it seems, as the ones his father tended when he was a young boy.

Dark and thick with history.

He hides from the other children deep in the bosom of that wood.

Curled up over his knees with his dog at his side, a dog who suffered a gunshot blast

to the head and is horribly disfigured.

But still mindlessly pecks its way through the leaves and branches, snuffling wetly at

this thing or that, with its tattered bloody snout.

There is no bullying, per se, or maltreatment.

The other children are no more or less cruel to him than they are to anybody else.

They simply are, is the problem where Jean-Claude is not.

He's hollow and see through, like an empty old fishbowl.

A broken container riddled with barely discernible cracks so that every time he tries to fill

himself, those contents slowly leak out.

The boy sees the man as a ghost, and the opposite is true as well.

They exist for a moment in the same mental vignette, a child, and the man he will become, a man

and the seed of his own existence.

A frail, pitiful thing, curled up on the leaves of the forest.

...