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The Demon’s Cantos Part 26

A dream came over Byron like a warm breeze.

Nan stood in the doorway to Byron’s bedroom, leaning against the door frame. She looked at Byron affectionately with auburn eyes.

Byron, just over four years old but looking more like three, sat cross-legged on the carpet, myopically focused on a pile of wooden blocks strewn in front of him. One by one he would pick up each block, look it over with a degree of thoroughness usually reserved for the professional examination of fine gemstones, and then come to some cryptic internal conclusion about where the block belonged. With the greatest care, Byron would take each block in two hands and lift it onto a growing tower of other blocks.

The boy was totally consumed with his chosen activity. He didn’t notice Nan watching him from the doorway for nearly ten minutes, and only turned in her direction to retrieve a stray block that had fallen behind him. When he noticed his Nan, Byron broke into a wide toothed smile.

“What you doing there baby?” Nan asked.

Byron turned toward his assortment of blocks, broken into several towers, with a self-pleased look that seemed to say, oh what, these silly things?.

“I’m fixing them,” he said with no small amount of pride.

Nan gave the blocks another look. Byron had three different piles going, each rising pristinely upwards, every block set perfectly onto the next. However, looking at them at a glance, Nan could not make out any kind of pattern to the blocks. Byron seemed to have arranged them at random – an assortment of different colors and letters that didn’t even spell any words.

Nan looked at Byron appraisingly, “that’s some good stacking there baby.”

Little Byron lit up like a light-bulb. He was always overjoyed to receive praise from Nan, no matter what for. He sat up a little bit straighter.

“I tried really hard,” he began, looking with some annoyance at one of the blocks, “they aren’t perfect.”

At a glance, the blocks looked like exact, homogeneous cubes to Nan. “How do you know which block belongs where?”

Byron took on an almost professorial energy, as though he’d been asked a very important question by a very important person. “You have to count the lines!” he burst out, as though the answer was liable to change the world.

Nan thinned her eyes. She looked at the blocks again. Each block was a cube, which had a big letter in the center of each face of the cube, surrounded by a thick colored square outline. She wasn’t sure what Byron meant by counting the lines. “Why don’t you show me baby.”

Byron became excited at the prospect – so excited that he swung around heedless of his own block towers and slammed his hand through two of them, sending his hardwork scattering to the floor in a mess.

Nan saw the signs on him immediately – the tension in his spine, the way his hands began to shake gently like leaves in the wind – he was about to have an attack. She sighed to herself and went to sit beside the boy’s small form.

Byron was staring wide eyed at the mess of ruined block towers with the same intensity as though he were looking at a fresh corpse. He appeared to be frozen in space and time, lower lip quivering, like the beginnings of a seizure that would never come. Soon he began making a high pitched noise, at first soft and low and then rising in volume until it filled the whole room.

Nan took a deep breath and rested each of her delicate, finely wrinkled hands onto Byron’s shoulders, trying to press her calmness into him.

“Byron, it’s OK – it’s alright – it’s just blocks,” she said, making her voice as gentle as she could, trying to ignore the animal intensity of Byron’s whine, “you’re OK baby. You’re OK.”

Slowly, one decibel at a time, Byron calmed down, until finally the tension left his spine and he hunched over gently. Sweat beaded on his smooth forehead and his skin took on a bright rosy color from the exertion. The boy blinked twice and suddenly he was back with Nan, in his bedroom, in reality, the calamity of the broken block towers behind him like a bad dream.

He turned abashedly to Nan, eyes toward the ground, “I messed up,” he said, starting to cry, “I’m sorry I messed up Nan.”

Nan looked at Byron with immense warmth and affection and couldn’t help but smile. She shook her head and placed the warm skin of her palm on Byron’s hot, tear stained cheek. “You didn’t mess up, Baby. Ain’t no way you could mess up being yourself.”

Byron was heartened by that and swiped at his eyes with his forearm. “I get real scared,” Byron said simply, and looked up at Nan with forlorn hope.

Nan took Byron’s hand in hers and looked him in the eye. “You know what I do, when I’m very scared Byron?”

Byron went still as an apprentice before a master, a devotee before a guru, ready to receive great and universal wisdom. “You get scared?” he asked, amazed.

Nan laughed, “of course baby. Everybody gets scared.”

“Not like me.”

Nan pursed her lips and nodded, “not just like you, we’re all different – but everyone gets scared Byron. And when I get scared, I take my hand,” she lifted her left hand up to show Byron, “and I do this.”

Very carefully, very slowly, Nan touched the tip of her aged but elegant brown thumb to the tip of each of her fingers in turn. Byron watched carefully as Nan’s thumb reached her pinky and then started back, ending at her pointer finger. When she finished, Byron looked up at her face.

Nan took a deep breath in and out and opened her eyes.

“Whenever I feel afraid, or nervous, or worried, I just do that until I feel better.”

Byron blinked in amazement. He might as well have been told the secret to eternal life. Byron looked down at his own hand and touched his thumb to his pointer finger for just a second before cautiously looking up at Nan. “Is it OK . . .” he started nervously, “ . . . If I try?”

Nan laughed gently, “Sure baby.”

Byron turned his full attention toward his hand, very carefully moving his fingers through the motions, until he went through the whole cycle. Then he took a deep breath, mimicking Nan exactly. When he finished he opened his eyes and gave Nan an astonished smile.

“It really worked!” He said, and started the motions again, moving even slower, even more carefully this time.

“I know!” Nan laughed. “You can use that whenever you want Byron,” she gave Byron a meaningful look, “whenever you start to feel afraid.”

Byron nodded solemnly and continued practicing his new ability, repeating the motions and taking a deep breath after every cycle.

As Byron focused on his new relaxation exercise, Nan’s eye fell on of the tumbled blocks beside her right leg. Looking down at it, she noticed something. There were lines. They were very thin lines, almost imperceptible, lightly carved into the background of each surface of the wooden cube. They didn’t look like an intentional design, more like an accidental manufacturing defect on account of the poorly made blocks, but the lines were on every surface of the cube.

Looking closely she brought her reading glasses down out of her hair and onto the bridge of her nose, and counted the lines on one face of the cube. Fifteen. Then she turned the cube in her hand and counted the lines on the next face and the next. There were fifteen subtle lines on each surface.

Then she put down that block and picked up another and counted the lines on that one.

Fourteen.

Leaning forward, carefully shifting onto her hands and knees, Nan looked at Byron’s remaining block tower and counted the lines on one surface of each of the cubes. Each one had sixteen lines, and she had no doubt that if she picked up each one of those blocks and looked at each surface with great care, she would find that every face of every cube in that tower had sixteen lines – just as the blocks in the other two towers almost certainly had fifteen and fourteen lines on each surface as well.

“Hmm,” Nan said, sitting back, groaning just a bit from the ache in her knees, “you are a very special young man Byron.”

Byron didn’t hear. He was too busy taking a deep breath in and out, his eyes closed, the tip of his small thumb resting gently against his ring finger.

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