Coward Ryan - Chapter 1

PART 1 - Coward Ryan 1

Ryan Littleton woke up one day and suddenly realised that he was a coward. Everything he had ever done, he realised as he lay there in bed and thought back over his life, he had done out of a base instinct of fear.2

“Bugger,” Ryan said feelingly, for it’s a terrible thing to suddenly realise you’ve always been scared – even when you hadn’t thought you were at the time – and a terrible thing to realise that you’ve never done anything brave or adventurous or risky in your entire twelve years of life. 3

“It makes you feel somewhat weak and pathetic,” Ryan said to himself and then it hit him that what perhaps was even worse was to realise that everything he’d ever thought and believed about himself was wrong. 4

It gave Ryan a feeling of utter hopelessness and despair because suddenly he didn’t know anything about himself. He felt as if he’d just been struck with amnesia but amnesia only about himself and not about anything else. The only thing he knew for sure was that it was Monday and he was afraid of getting up and going to school.5

So Ryan lay there in his bed and thought about all these things until his mother came and banged on his door. She was, as usual, quite harrowed and cross and, as usual, yelled at him to get up. “You’d better be out of that bed, young man! You’ve got less than two minutes!” She never said or else but she really didn’t need to. Ryan always felt the threat as if she had.6

Ryan considered this in light of his new understanding about himself and decided that as afraid as he was about going to school, he was – right then – much more afraid of his mother’s unspoken threat. He didn’t know what she might do if he didn’t get up (of course, being the coward he was, he’d never gone so far as to find out) and he found to his utter annoyance that actually realising you were a coward made everything else seem so much more fearful. 7

Usually, he’d carefully listen to the sound of her high heeled business shoes clopping around briskly on the wooden floorboards and then when it sounded like she might be coming back he’d quickly leap out of bed and open the door just before she reached it. But now he found that he didn’t even want to risk his mother coming down the hall today in case today was the day when she finally got sick of it. 8

So Ryan got up, put on his school uniform and opened his door a full two minutes earlier than he normally would have. 9

His mother was surprised and because she was surprised she was annoyed at the same time. As a successful business woman she was very strict about keeping schedules and having things organised and set into a routine. Whenever anyone did anything unexpected or surprising it usually meant that her schedule for the whole day would be thrown out of whack and so it irked her greatly whenever someone did so. 10

Perhaps Ryan getting up two minutes early does not seem such a big deal but Ryan’s mother was so used to getting annoyed at people not sticking to her carefully organised schedules at work that she had come to rely on her home life being strictly the same every day. Now it wasn’t and it annoyed her greatly.11

She banged down a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice for Ryan’s breakfast. “Eat up! You’ve got less than seven minutes!” she snapped and then went angrily clopping down the hall in her heels and rapped on Ryan’s door as if she still felt the need to carry out her routine even though Ryan was already awake. 12

Ryan noticed that he’d been given an extra two minutes for breakfast and rightly thought that he could take his time eating today but for some reason his mother had looked extra ferocious this morning and he found himself eating even faster than he usually would have out of sheer terror. He put it down to the fact that knowing he was a coward made everything seem so much scarier but it didn’t help to relieve his fear in the least. 13

As a result, he finished breakfast four minutes earlier than he usually would have. His mother, of course, was even more irate at this and refused to do the dishes until a full four minutes later. Because of this, she was standing over Ryan as he made his lunch and prepared his bag for school – “You’ve got less than fourteen minutes!” (four minutes more than he’d usually have) – which, since his mother was even more frightening than four minutes ago, made him move even faster than he had when he’d been eating breakfast.14

By now, Ryan had put his mother’s schedule almost ten minutes behind and she knew without doubt that whatever she did to try and get herself back on track would only be ruined by Ryan’s sudden outburst of efficiency. So she did what she would usually do at work when someone wasn’t fitting into her carefully laid out plans. She removed Ryan from them completely.15

Usually, Ryan’s mother would drive Ryan to school in her sleek, silver car but because everything was now ten minutes too early she made him walk to school instead. She then went about getting her schedule back on track and once that was accomplished she promptly put the whole morning at the back of her mind.16

Ryan was glad to be out of the house. He was still a coward – he knew he was – but somehow the fear had diminished. It was probably because he no longer had to deal with the fear of his mother but as soon as he realised this he suddenly found that he was now terribly afraid and worried about going to school.17

Ryan was not very well liked at his school. He was too small and quiet for the popular and sporty group, not talented enough for the intelligent and nerdy group and considered too queer for the leftover, average group in between. He did not like going to school for this reason and now he knew he was a coward he knew why school was the way it was and why he did not like it. The answer, of course, was fear. 18

He also knew that no matter how scared he was of going to school he was much more scared of not going to school and of what would happen if his mother found out. So he kept on walking. 19

He wondered, as he went, why he had only just realised that he was a coward that morning. How could he not have known before? He supposed he must have been so good at pretending that he wasn’t to other people that in his fear he’d even deceived himself.20

It was a bummer really because he decided as he went that he really didn’t like being a coward and being constantly scared of everything but he didn’t know what he could do about it and he knew he’d probably be too scared to do anything about it anyway. 21

It seemed a double whammy to him. To stop himself from being scared he had to do something that he would likely be too scared to do so he had to firstly stop himself from being scared in order to do that something which would then stop himself from being scared for good.22

He kicked a pebble and it skittered into the bushes on the side of the road. There were some things, he knew, which were far too trivial to be scared about and yet when he thought back he found he probably still had been scared of them anyway. 23

And it was stupid because those trivial things mostly turned out all right so maybe, he thought, if I did enough little things that I’m afraid of and they turned out to be all right and nothing to have been afraid about in the first place, then maybe I’ll stop fearing things before I do them. 24

But he knew that probably wouldn’t quite work because even though he already knew all those little things were nothing to be worried about, somehow he just couldn’t stop himself from being worried about them anyway.25

He kicked another pebble that also skittered into the bushes on the side of the road and it was around this time that a voice interrupted his thoughts. “So it was you who kicked that stone into me, was it?”26

Ryan jumped with fright. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it,” he babbled automatically although as yet he couldn’t see who it was he was talking to. If anything, this made him even more afraid – afraid of looking foolish, worried about imagining things and terrified of not knowing what he was up against.27

There was a puff of warm air from above and Ryan felt like he was being intently stared at. However he still didn’t know where from but he guessed it was in the vague direction of where the puff of air had come from. Why these two things were linked he couldn’t quite fathom. All he knew was that he was terrified.28

“You’re afraid,” the voice mused and Ryan knew by the tone of it that he really was being stared at intently. This made him feel worse. “Fear surrounds you like a spider web imprisoning a small bug,” the voice added. There was another puff of warm air. “Why?”29

“Um,” Ryan said. His voice squeaked oddly before his throat closed up completely and he found he could not speak out of sheer terror. 30

Here, a second voice spoke up from somewhere close to the ground and said, “I’d be scared too if I were him and I were talking to a dragon I couldn’t even see.” 31

For some reason Ryan suddenly thought that if cats could talk, this is what they would sound like. He looked down and found to his astonishment that staring up at him with one blue eye and one brown was a decidedly sleek looking tabby cat. It blinked at him slowly, first with the blue eye and then the brown, but it did not look to have said anything. Ryan wondered if he was going crazy and rather feared that he was.32

The first voice said ponderingly, “Hmm, I’d forgotten where I was. But you’re wrong, Cat.” There were some more hmm’s and then another puff of warm air. 33

Ryan was suddenly put in mind of the time he’d gotten in trouble at school – when the headmaster had puffed on his pipe and tried to think of what sort of punishment Ryan should get – and he found himself shaking with fear of what might come next. 34

But all that happened was that something intangible blew gently towards him, stripped a little something away and then was gone.35

“There,” the voice said in obvious satisfaction and asked again, “Why are you smothered in fear, boy?”36

To Ryan’s surprise he didn’t feel quite so scared anymore or at least not so scared that he couldn’t speak. So Ryan said, “That’s just who I am. I’m a coward.”37

There was cat-like laughter from the cat-like voice. Ryan quickly looked down at the tabby cat to try and catch it out but it just sat there and blinked at him with its one blue eye and one brown as it had before.38

At the same time, the first voice roared out, “Nonsense!” and there was a sudden huge blast of that intangibleness that he’d felt before. It was the scariest thing that had happened to him so far – it felt like his skin was being stripped away from his bones – and yet this time all of his fear seemed to be gone.39

“There!” the voice said again, even more satisfied than before. It sounded a little smug.40

Ryan’s skin was still on his bones and his clothes were still on his skin and he felt perfectly fine. In fact, he found that he’d never felt so brave or carefree in his life. And he quite liked it. “That was incredible!” he said in his newfound confidence. He much preferred this to being scared all the time and suddenly he found a whole bunch of questions clamouring in his mind. “What did you do? Are you really an invisible dragon? Why are you here? How come –?” 41

There was a pondering hmm from the voice and another warm puff of air which seemed to cut across Ryan’s questions and stop them in their tracks. After a moment of puffing thoughtfulness the voice said, “I merely unravelled your cobweb of fear.” 42

Ryan was fairly disgruntled about that response. There’d been a finality to those words which made it quite clear to him that no more answers would be forthcoming so it rather surprised him when the voice said, “Any other questions?”43

“Yes. Is that cat talking or is it something else?”44

There was a sound almost like disdain from the cat-like voice. “Something else?” it muttered dourly and Ryan got the impression it didn’t like being called ‘it’ and some ‘thing’. He felt he’d made a mistake there and realised that if he really was faced with an invisible dragon he’d probably better be polite, whether that cat really was talking or not.45

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” Ryan said meekly in the vague direction of the cat. He still did not know if the cat-like voice was the cat and he felt rather foolish about talking to it in case it turned out that it wasn’t. “But please, I’d really rather know who I was talking to.”46

“Really?” the cat-like voice purred. “Why don’t you come into the bushes then?” It sounded rather sly, as if it was up to something.47

“Stop it, Cat,” the first voice demanded irritably. “You’re undoing my work. His fear’s come back.”48

Ryan, to his annoyance, found that this was true. He hadn’t liked the sly tone in the cat-like voice at all and he was starting to feel like he should be running away. But fear seemed to have rooted him to the spot. He couldn’t make his legs move at all out of sheer terror and suddenly it hit him that he was now just as scared as he had been before. Thinking back over the last few moments, he rather thought his fear had been coming back rapidly and growing stronger and stronger all along.49

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” the cat-like voice – Cat, Ryan supposed – sulked. “He’s doing it himself.”50

“No I’m not!” Ryan protested in a fearful squawk. “I hate being scared!”51

“Hmm,” the first voice pondered but before it could carry on with its thinking the cat-like voice butted in with a sudden change in tone. It sounded rather urgent and almost panicky. 52

“Strago! There really isn’t time!” it yowled.53

The first voice – Strago, Ryan presumed – harrumphed irritably but said, “I believe we’ve found our disturbance anyway. Come here, boy.”54

Ryan paled. He felt like all the blood in his face was draining to his feet. Somehow he knew with utmost certainty that he was the disturbance they were talking about and he was dead scared of what they might do to him. 55

“Oh do give him a prod, Strago!” the cat-like voice whined. It sounded rather worried and strained.56

There was a humph from Strago. He sounded displeased but there was a blast of that same intangibleness as before and coward Ryan was suddenly courageous Ryan again. He found he could move again quite freely and all the blood that had drained from his face earlier had rushed back into its rightful place. Ryan swayed a bit where he stood. It had made him rather dizzy.57

When he’d recovered, he somehow knew with utmost certainty that if he’d run away in fear earlier on he likely would never have seen – or rather, heard – these two voices again. He also knew that he would then have been a coward for the rest of his life. What he wanted more than anything was to be courageous and brave and confident and he’d just seen twice now that this invisible – dragon? – could make him so. 58

And even if they did eat him or whatever, he thought he’d certainly prefer that over being a scaredy coward the rest of his life. He didn’t think he could stand being afraid of everything at every moment. So Ryan hoisted his school bag, stepped through the bushes at the side of the road – being mindful of that tabby cat with its one blue eye and one brown – and disappeared from the world that he knew.59

Right then, his mother was driving past Ryan’s school at exactly the same time – according to her usual routine and schedule – that she usually would have to drop him off had Ryan not gotten up two minutes early, finished breakfast four minutes early, been ready ten minutes early and thus been made to walk to school instead.60

She did not think about him again until she got a phone call saying that Ryan was not where he should be but by that time it was far too late.61

~62

To be continued...
Next: Chapter 2