Samuel Robinson was a loner. He grew up in a small town in Arkansas
and was an only child in the purest sense of the word. His parents crooned over him, dressing
him in cute sailor suits and making him pose with a fishing pole for Christmas
cards, and throwing lavish birthday parties with ponies and clowns which were
usually only attended by the neighbor’s and their kids, who would end up
playing with each other while Samuel stood next to the clown with a lopsided
cone-shaped birthday hat and icing on his face. His parents
knew their Sammy was different; he barely talked and they were aware of his
friendless existence. Their
extravagant compensation and attempts to fix him, to mold him into an asset of
their chiffon-layered life style, eventually turned into a conscious ignorance;
Mrs. Robinson kept smiling and Mr. Robinson kept pretending he was playing catch
with little Sammy every night, when they both knew Samuel would never fill this
reality for them. He was perfectly
content with his existence and his complete disconnect from any other humans in
his life did not bother him in the least.
Samuel wore black pants that were a
little bit too short for him, white socks, black golfing shoes, a white shirt,
suspenders, and a green bowtie. He wore this outfit most days of his life,
ordering bigger sizes as he got older, and his hair was a very dark brown and
usually unkempt, unless his mother managed to lure him to her long enough for
her to put a comb through it.
One of Samuel’s favorite activities was
to cut clippings from the newspaper everyday. He would float downstairs in his usual celestial daze to
find the folded newspaper left over from his father on the breakfast
table. He would look the through
the paper and cut out about ten headlines, or pictures, or words he enjoyed or
found amusing. Sometimes the
clippings told a story, sometimes they meant nothing at all. He did this every morning, and then he
would bring the perfectly cut newspaper scraps up to his room, where he stored
them in his trunk at the foot of his bed.
After several years, the trunk became too small for his newspaper
thoughts, and he began putting them in shoeboxes. As he got older, the number of shoeboxes increased, until he
could no longer keep them in just his room; he had to expand to the attic. Eventually Samuel’s parents died; his
father passed when he was thirty-one and his mother when he was thirty-four. Samuel never moved out of that house,
and when the newspaper came everyday he would cut out his clippings and
carefully put them in the latest shoebox, and then he would never look at them
again. Samuel did this every day
until he was fifty-six years old.
His demeanor never changed much; he was still the same lone person
without feeling the least bit lonely. One fall afternoon, Samuel burned his
house down. He lit four matches,
and dropped each one into a shoebox.
He walked out of the front door, hooking his coat over his shoulder on
his finger and not once looking back as the house began to leak smoke like an
old diseased animal. Neighbors
gathered in panic as the fire became more eminent, none of them knowing that
anybody had really been living in that house, since not one of them took a
second look in the twenty-or-so years since Mrs. Robinson had been lowered into
the ground.
Samuel watched from a respective distance
with the air of someone enjoying a fall day in the park. He was leaning against a tree. His green bowtie hung loose around his
neck, and he held a pair of scissors in his hand.
