Just a Short Intermission From Sequential Art...

I'm in the middle of my 3-page comic assignment, which will be posted AS SOON AS IT'S FINISHED. In the meantime, an intermission.
The following is a short story I submitted for shits n' giggles to an East Grand Forks contest at the library. The prize was only like &50, but I thought what the hell. I had an idea floating around in my head that same day, but didn't actually write the story for about 3 weeks, and got it submitted about 4 days before the contest ended (Nov. 30).
Anyway, I just got the winners' list back today, and unfortunately, I'm not on it anywhere. But I like my story enough that I decided I would post it after the contest was over, so here it is. It was 4 pages double-spaced, so I'd advise anyone interested in reading it to take a quick bathroom break. It's not a long story, but I don't want anyone getting a few paragraphs in and then having to pee. It screws up the rhythm.

The Punchline
Doug Hunter

There wasn’t much wrong with Harold attitude-wise. He always walked into the bar around 6:30, asked for a basket of popcorn and occasionally a pop, and sat in the far corner for about three hours, watching everyone who entered or exited. Mostly the girls, actually. The local girls knew him and saw that there was nothing in those drooped, unblinking eyes that suggested malice or misogyny. Out-of-town women were easily and visibly disturbed by the gaze, and it occasionally got him caught in an altercation with the men accompanying them.
Locals knew Harold because of his extraordinary birth into the world. He was one of a set of triplets born of a Sicilian woman attending college in a neighboring town and her husband who had been born in the very same hospital just eighteen years prior. Sammy, the first of the triplets to emerge, came out healthy and screaming. Kelly, the second, came out with a full head of hair, but was jaundiced. Harold came out silently, eyes half closed as though entranced. If not for healthy vitals, the doctors might have thought him dead. Once out of the hospital, he began acting like a normal, newborn child.
It was a simple car accident that disrupted what might have been an otherwise average childhood. An old woman pulled out in front of them at a stoplight, and was hit at more than fifty miles per hour. The mother, father and the old woman died at the scene, and Sammy followed two days later. Kelly suffered a severe back injury, which would cause neck pain all through her life. Harold suffered head trauma, but otherwise appeared okay. When paramedics reached the scene, they discovered him looking through the windshield, as though concentrating on something far away, and laughing.
Harold and Kelly were placed under the care of a paternal aunt, who gave them a good home, but was perplexed by Harold’s odd behavior. He didn’t talk much. During the most humorous moments of a television show, he wouldn’t even crack a smile. He never read anything, he had trouble with schoolwork and he didn’t get along well with other kids. When he cut himself, he would look at the wound without reaction and watch it bleed. This stoic behavior kept their aunt from finding out about the cut until it became infected, so Kelly often had to accompany him out of doors.
The only times he did smile were disturbing. His expression would fall blank, and the smile would appear with the same far-off concentration, as though he were trying to relive the experience of the traumatic accident. Doctors thought he had autism at first, but a visit to a Neurologist revealed that Harold in fact had epilepsy. The periods of dazed concentration were seizures that were being experienced at an alarming rate, though short-lived.
Kelly could not stand the laugh. It was low and rapid, like a hail of vocal machine gun fire. After the accident, he only laughed at her pain. Every limb she sprained, the girls in grade school who frequently accosted her on account of her weight (she was guilty of bullying herself), even the popular high school boys who teased her for dressing like an old man. She would arrive at the side exit of the school to find him cackling to himself. Sometimes the laugh itself would induce a seizure.
Even though Harold was of average intelligence for his age, his seizures prevented his receiving a proper education and often disrupted entire class sessions. He never minded the teasing, but he felt humiliated when he was placed in “special” classes. After that, his resentment at being called a retard furthered the rift between him and his former peers. He left school before tenth grade and soon made up the time wandering about town. His aunt had stopped lecturing him long before, realizing that she couldn’t get through to him the importance of graduating. Every time they fought, he would get overly excited, bringing on another seizure. He would often be seen sitting near the corner store, muttering incomprehensible lyrics to songs only he knew.
His uncle never had much to do with him. One moment, he would be convinced Harold was criminally insane and should be locked away before he hurt someone (and become someone else’s burden). The next, he would be convinced Harold was faking his seizures to get his way.
He would fly into a rage when Harold would play his Tom Waits music, comparing Waits’ voice to that of a drunken bear. Harold found it cathartic to hear the gravelly voice with the down-on-his-luck lyrics, and he never had a seizure when listening to it. He could never remember the lyrics on his own; he had to have the song playing for them to come to him. Kelly would often come in and listen with him, and when she did, he would always play “No One Knows I’m Gone”. It was the one song he could sing to her in perfect imitation.
Harold liked to walk at night, much to his family’s chagrin. Kelly wouldn’t go out at night much, so he often snuck out on his own and went down to the river. Some nights, he wouldn’t come home, and Kelly would go out to look for him in the morning before school. He was always in the same place, thankfully, sleeping under a train bridge in a concrete cubby-hole. His uncle would remark, with visible sarcasm, that “one way or another, he’s always headed off to no where.”
Kelly never dated until her senior year. She was still a little heavier than what was deemed acceptable by other senior girls, but she was pretty nonetheless. The derogatory remarks from the popular boys faded as they found in her a jovial personality who always managed to get cigarettes for them from an unknown source. It took longer than she would have liked to evolve into the kind of girl they could see dating, but she figured it was better late than never.
Her newly acquired social life left Harold at home to contend with his apathetic aunt and forever-angry uncle. Before long, Harold was out again and found himself a new haunt. It was a college bar about a mile from his home. The owner was a friend of his uncle’s, and figured it wouldn’t do any harm so long as he wasn’t served alcohol. When Harold kept returning, the owner thought it better that he spent his nights there than under a bridge.
Kelly found David B.’s Epileptic in her school library and cried most of the way through it. She saw so many parallels between Harold and Jean-Christophe, but had to quit reading toward the end when Pierre-Francois fantasizes about having an articulate conversation with his brother about what they both went through; she suffered the same frustrations of not being able to fully understand what went through his mind during these periods.
Jimmy was one of those kids that one couldn’t help but like. He was a good listener, he dressed nice, and he had a persuasive air about him that made even the strictest of teachers simply smile at him when he walked into class late. Harold knew him only briefly before dropping out, and didn’t care for his eyes. They always had a sparkle in them, and Harold didn’t like things that sparkled. He thought they acted as a marquisette obscuring the real Jimmy. Besides, sparkling things, if bright enough could bring on a seizure.
Jimmy liked Kelly, however. She made him feel at ease, as though he could tell her anything and she would accept it without judgment. The more he talked to her, the more he felt drawn to her romantically. It took him three weeks to finally work up the nerve to ask her to the school dance, a request that was received with overjoyed affirmation. Harold was not as thrilled to hear of the good news, but he was always happy to feel that Kelly was going somewhere positive with her life.
On the afternoon just before the dance, Harold lumbered slowly into Kelly’s room just as she had pricked her finger on her broach. He looked exhausted, his eyes were sunken in, and his smiling lips were terribly chapped. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, “ he replied, “I guess.”
“You should lie down for a while.”
“I might, when you leave.”
“Thanks for taking the whole dance thing so well. I’m sorry you’re not coming.”
“It’s okay. They never play my music, anyway.”
“People around here don’t know how to dance to Tom Waits.”
Harold chuckled and turned to leave. On his way out, Kelly could hear him softly singing “No One Knows I’m Gone”. She still worried about him. People like her were strong, they could take care of themselves in the real world. Harold was her twin brother, and yet his maturity fluctuated wildly. At times, he would seem older, mostly in the way he moved. His innocent nature, however, made him seem more like a child.
She also feared that his Epilepsy would one day win out and bring on a seizure that would never stop. She didn’t know if she could handle her twin being a vegetable. She often wondered how circumstances of the accident worked to kill the rest of her family, make him the way he was, and only damage her physically.
She couldn’t keep thinking these thoughts just now. The doorbell rang, and Jimmy was behind it, waiting to take her to the dance, fall in love with her, and embrace her with the realization that she was the only one for him, and all the other girls didn’t measure up. So she hoped, anyway. She’d carve out a place in her little heaven for Harold later, after the magical evening.
As she walked by Harold’s room, she heard the strained voice accompanied by a mournful piano, doling out “Georgia Lee” from his boom box. She thought of popping her head in and telling him goodnight, but realized it might just be better to leave. He looked so terrible tonight, but she didn’t want to dwell on his condition, otherwise she’d have no fun at the dance.
Harold could hear the footsteps stop by his door, then move along. He could hear muffled cries of delight about a beautiful corsage from such a handsome man, the faint click of a camera, then the slam of the door. The smile faded from his lips and the thin veil of sleep covered him.
About an hour later, he awakened. The CD had long since stopped. He’d only been asleep for a couple hours. His stomach hurt, and he felt the way he did after a seizure, but he swore to himself that no such thing had, in fact, occurred. Within minutes he was at the front door, ready for egress into the falling snow outside. His uncle, who was reading in the living room, looked up and asked, “Where are we off to tonight?”
Harold, without looking back, muttered through once-more smiling lips, “No where.”
It was about two-thirty in the morning when Harold’s uncle jerked awake to the ringing phone. His sense of dread brought a little indigestion as he answered angrily, “Hello!”
It was the bar owner.
“Yeah, it’s Harold. I think he’s had another spell. A pretty bad one.”
“Shit,” his uncle replied, “alright, I’ll be right over to get him. How is he doing right now?”
“Oh, better. It was weird, though. I couldn’t figure out what was so damned funny.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he’s been laughing like crazy since he wandered in.”