The Boy With The Long Shadow

And the 1918 Incident

By E. Viona

For Made Up Words

This story ends in 1900s America, but begins in a place far beyond the confines of our world. In that place, that prison, a forgotten god stirred. A distant voice had whispered his name.

To write this god’s name is dangerous, but this much is safe to tell: There was a time when he was the only One. Then new gods came and usurped him. The new gods confined the primal god to a distant corner of existence. Worshippers of the new gods erected statues over the ruins of the old. In time, everyone forgot the old god’s transgressions. Then they forgot the old god altogether. With no one to worship him, the old god lay dying.

The distant voice retrieved the old god from obscurity. It pulled him through realms of formlessness and shape, through the pain of each transition, until firm ground met with his lion’s feet. Yet he did not become solid like you or me. In our world he was a shadow with an unnatural shape.

The enormous half-lion, half-human shadow found himself out of his element in 1918 Pittston, Pennsylvania. He had slipped his prison confines for the confines of an Industrial Age signage sweatshop. Windows opaque with filth were painted shut. Sawdust and fumes burned the lungs.

Gone were the tribes who loved the god. There was no trace of their bloodline, their culture, or the stone idols that the god once inhabited. Extinct also were the sacred cave lions, along with the caves where his worshippers piled their offerings. The lions, like the tribes, were hunted into oblivion over 41,000 years ago — wiped out by the marauders and their new gods.

The lion god bristled his mane and bared his fangs. His form grew darker. As his fists clenched, power concentrated into rivulets of molten rage that glowed in his veins. The primal god would annihilate this new world in the name of all he had lost.

Something at the god’s feet caught his eye. A little unwashed boy was sitting on his knees, not 12 inches from those lion’s feet. He was small for his age of 7. Tiny hands, too calloused and scarred to belong to a child in a fair world, rested on a lap wearing secondhand trouser shorts. Rolling blond curls hung like jungle overgrowth over eyes wide with astonishment rather than fear.

The little orphan boy was delighted to be noticed. Today was his birthday, but having not met the daily quota of woodworking 300 acceptable letters — despite working 16 hours without a break — the overseers had banished the boy to his corner without supper. With only an hour left of his birthday, the boy remained forgotten. He had pilfered letters from the rejection piles and was practicing his spelling when the god arrived. Unable to attend school, the boy was determined to teach himself how to read.

The primal god growled at the boy’s smell, his golden curls and level forehead — enduring traits of an enemy tribe. The god raised a claw to remove the boy from this world when the boy called the god by name, in a tone that betrayed his uncertainty. At this the god stayed his hand. The boy smiled and repeated the god’s name with confidence.

It was the boy’s small voice that had rescued the primal god.

The god could not fathom how this came to be, until a closer look revealed the answer: With the letters the boy had spelled something, choosing it as the name for an imaginary friend that he was creating — when in fact the boy had spelled the forbidden name of the lion god.

By accident, and despite his obvious lineage, the orphan boy had become the primal god’s only living disciple. For his part, the boy believed the lion god to be the imaginary friend of his creation.

The lion god let out a snort. This disciple had survived hardship and the elements with his spirit intact, but his body had not yet hardened against this era of steel and pathogenic horrors. The boy would have to be made ready.

The lion god crouched down to the boy’s level, the snarling maw only several inches from the boy’s grubby, beaming face. At length, the lion god said only one word to the boy:

“pt.th.ĕ.tk.”

The boy mimicked, “Putt… theh… tic.” He matched the creature’s furrowed brow and wrinkled his little nose as he worked through the disjointed syllables. “Puh… pathetic?”

The lion god’s eyes continued to bore through the child’s skull in a steady glare only eight inches away from the boy’s nose.

The boy giggled at the quirky elocution of his imaginary friend and dismissed the word as nonsense. He dragged sundry letters on the floor with effort and arranged them into a name. Then he pointed at what he’d done.

“Jack,” the boy read aloud, and then pointed at himself. “Jack. That’s me, pal. I’m Jack.” It was the only word that Jack knew how to spell. Jack readjusted his lax suspenders, which once belonged to a taller 6-year-old.

With a finger, the lion god flicked the motley “c” and “k” to the side and replaced them with a malformed “x.”

Jack wrinkled his nose and brow at the letters. “Ja… axe. Jax?”

The lion god gave the boy a slow cat’s blink.

In the tongue of the dead tribes, “jax” was phonetically similar to a now-forgotten noun, denoting vessels that were consecrated for religious service — most commonly, the stone idols that housed the lion god on earth.

“You want to call me Jax?” Jack asked. The boy scratched the messy curls on his head, releasing the finest puff of sawdust. “Well, all right. You can call me Jax.”