Handsome Freaks: Pio's Hunger Ch2-Prt 2

ezravan (63)in #story • 8 years ago (edited)

Handsome Freaks Cover

_"as he waited naked in the hall for his mother to finish his invisible brother's bath time, he could stand it no longer and shouted, _"Mother you're mad! There is no 'pene to wash as he washes his ano' because there is no pene, there is no ano, there is no one in the bath! For the sake of god's holy angels, let me have the warm water lest I freeze to death."_

Missed The Last Chapters?

Ch 1 - Prt 1 | Ch 1 Prt 2 | Ch 2 prt 1

This is an original STEEM series novel. If you like odd dramas about odd things, strangely funny and sad, freaks, bearded ladies, emotional pain of invisible boys–I'll be writing a chapter in the series at least each week here on Steamit. Resteem, UpVote & Follow @ezravan

Chapter 2 / Part 2

There was a saying common among the spiritually minded of Bergamo: It is better to be hungry than empty. Pio's intense hunger pangs might have been driven more by this emptienss, spoken of by the mystics, rather than any physical craving for food, but at ten years of age, Pio was still a child, he knew not of the many tortures of emptinesses a man can feel. To him, there was only one emptiness, as spacious as the heavens above, though, somehow it fit in his stomach.

His ravenous appetite could not be satisfied with the meager offerings his mother allotted for each meal. His turbulent stomach insulted Zola. She would pour pints of guilt on his head each meal as his belly growled at her with almost words she could understand.
"How will we feed your abyss of a belly? I've taken to traveling an extra week of the month to pay for your mouth, and still, your belly slaps my face," she’d say. "Why can't you be more like your older brother, so quiet and unobtrusive." Referring of course of his older brother Pio, who remained invisible and silent.

When Pio had turned ten years old the previous spring (the age of understanding), he began to question whether his twenty-three-year-old brother, Piero, actually existed at all. He had never seen or heard a sound from him before and thought his mother was mad to instruct a seemingly empty bathtub each night to wash the pene as if it were the ano. Even though Pio was only ten years of age, he could understand the awkward strangeness that must befall his older brother, being a 23-year-old man, told each night what to do with his pene and his ano; but, that did not eclipse the oddity of there not even been a visible person in the bath to began with.

Zola prepared the bath for Piero nearly every night, by boiling pots, dumping them one after the other until it was full of steamy cloudy water. Pio would watch from the hallway on cold winter nights, begging her to let him into the empty bathtub while the water was still piping hot, but always, he was told he must wait for his older brother Piero to finish and only Zola knew when that was. As far as Pio could tell it was when the bath water was cold.

Though Piero's empty bath was obviously a figment of his mother’s wild imagination, and easily explained, for even the townspeople knew she was mad, but not so easily explained was the dinner plate that was mysteriously emptied clean each night at his brother's dinner seat.

Pio was not one to have food go missing without notice. In this case, though, it went missing from the plate without even the smallest participation of anyone at the table. As if it really were being eaten and hidden in a belly. Pio had searched, in vain, the table legs and under the table for contraptions and also had noticed no sign of his mother participation in the mysterious disappearing food. There was no dog either to explain the phenommina–Zola hated dogs and said they were lost souls sent to earth for the same reason fallen angels were sent; to distract the human from her true calling.

Even with the lack of evidence of Zola’s trickery, Pio could not find it in himself to believe in a brother he had never seen, had never played bullfighter with, ran in the hills with, or even talked to.

Pio had never dared question Piero's transparent state directly to his mother before but on one particularly cold winter night, as he waited naked in the hall for his mother to finish his invisible brother's bath time, he could stand it no longer and shouted, "Mother you're mad! There is no 'pene to wash as he washes his ano' because there is no pene, there is no ano, there is no fragile boy in the bath! For the sake of god's holy angels, let me have the warm water lest I freeze to death."

She sprung up and slapped his face with a wet hand. "You should not question your brother's existence, you know well that the doctor has said he would not live long because he is so frail! Shame on you. When he finally dies, Pio, you will regret that you never believed he was alive!"

Though Elmo was a very quiet man, that night he did sit down beside Pio, unbathed and still crying in his bed, and managed a few words.

He bent down and caressed Pio's large head and spoke gently, "My dear Pio, look at the moon. Do you see any ropes that hold it? What holds the sun? What moves it across the sky? The old cypress tree behind the shed, so tall, stronger than any man, how is he moved to dance for us in the storms? Is what gives you life, your breath, less real than the one it gives life to? Think of these things. Maybe what is real, is not seen at all. Just because you have been given eyes, do not think that the creator needs your eyes to see her beloved creation."

After Elmo had left the room, Pio turned in his bed and looked at his brother's coffin across the room. There was an earlier time in his life when it was easy to believe everything that his mother said. An invisible brother? Why not. When he thought about it, he wasn’t even sure what he himself was, or what his mother was. He felt sometimes in his earliest memories that when his mother bathed him that he was her and that she was he. So why not an invisible third person.

Elmo, the one he called his father, was so quiet he also seemed invisible. He would cross him in hallway, and sometimes it seemed Elmo too was becoming slightly transparent. If he looked closely, as he quietly passed, he could see the bricks of the stairway showing through his face. There were no mirrors in the house either, so at times, even he himself wondered if parts of his own body had turned invisible. He could see his arms, legs, chest, and feet, but that did not mean that his face was not invisible, or the back of his head.

He knew one thing in this world though for sure and that was that even if his mother was mad, Elmo would never lie to him. It was that night, after his Elmo's quiet words and his mother's wet hand across his face that his faith was renewed in his brother. He turned in his bed, blew out the candle and spoke the first words he had ever uttered to Piero, "Goodnight brother."

It was the very next morning that his invisible older brother became as real as any brother when his yet still transparent hand slid a bowl of soup across the table to Pio.

To Be Continued...