Little King and the Why of it All
Orli Hellerstein
Sept 2021
It’s a bit hard to pity yourself when the one time you run out to cry in your favorite patch of sun and clovers, a two-year-old boy crawls through the hole in your moldy fence and sits down on your stomach. Steals your nose. Runs away from you.
Arisa is small and blonde and generally impressionable. Her boyfriend broke up with her a few days ago because her nose was too small to kiss. Every time he went to try, it seemed to move out of his way and he would get spit under her eye. She loves him about as much as anyone can love anyone at 12 and has taken to putting on long dresses and sighing loudly at windows while her parents watch. They find her dramatic mourning a nuisance and tell her that they “don’t tolerate this kind of attitude in our household young lady,” and Arisa runs out the door.
She’s very picturesque, running across the acres her parents own in bare feet and her favorite blue wrap dress. It’s clearly meant for an older girl, or certainly a bigger girl, but she likes the way it looks. She can wrap one side of the dress over her stomach and the other over that, all the way around to the middle of her back and turn the sash about her waist three times. The bottom flies out like a train behind her as she runs, and by the time she gets to her secret spot in the clover patch, her cheeks are strawberries and her toes are grapes. Everything is wet and damp, the dew and her cheeks, so she throws herself into a pile on the clover and wails.
Her tears don’t wet the grass any more than it already is. She’s inconsequential to the little field except for the clovers she crushes under the weight of her performative misery.
There isn’t enough sun in the sky for the boy’s bare body to cast a shadow across Arisa’s back, but she feels the intrusion all the same. The moment she turns onto her back to address him, he plops his naked bum onto her stomach. Oof, and she’s rolling him to one side, wrapping an arm around his cold body.
“What are you doing here?”
The boy curls his nose at her, like she’s the one who’s dressed inappropriately. For a moment he’s got all the dignity of a royal king, brown eyes and brown fists tightening at the sight of her. Arisa sniffles and pities herself — that even a toddler might find her too ugly for words — and sits up. The boy stands. He uncurls one fist.
“Why.”
Little boys don’t ask questions. They tell you questions. The difference is quite apparent in that they don’t actually care for your answer.
Arisa pulls her feet under her, wipes her cheeks, and bends forward the way she saw older girls do when they helped out with her little sister. “Because you aren’t meant to be here.”
The boy’s eyes flip over on his face. “Why.”
“Because this is my special crying spot.”
“Why.”
“Because I don’t like company when I’m sad.”
The boy licks his lips lazily and sits down, bare as anything, on the wet grass. “Why.” He seems invested.
It’s not something Arisa has thought much about. “Well…” she begins but the boy just starts giggling. “My sorrow is nothing to be joked about!” Arisa shakes her finger in the boy’s face but he continues to laugh. “I am a woman of much misery! A beacon of pain in a world that knows nothing of longing!”
“Why?”
That one is a question.
Arisa lets out another of her long-suffering sighs. “My love has left me. He ran from me because my nose is too small to kiss.” The boy seems to consider this. He points to his own nose and waits until she nods. Then he reaches out and yanks her nose hard. “Got it!” he squeals, and Arisa gasps.
“Give me back my nose!” she screams and lunges for him.
The boy runs. She follows at full speed so it doesn’t take much for her to catch up and snatch her nose back.
“Don’t take my nose!” she scolds him.
“Why?”
Arisa gasps and clutches her chest. She falls back in the clovers and stares up at the sky where the sun is breaking the clouds. The little boy gets bored and toddles off. She is forever changed, or as forever changed as you can be at 12, when everything is changing anyway.
Orli Hellerstein is from Berkeley, California and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.