SANCTUARY
The summer Rupert turned 15, his parents decided to sell their house on Finkle street. Rupert had been born on Finkle Street, and up to that point, never been forced to venture outside.
As a child, when the world became too much, Rupert would duck into his bedroom closet. He’d close the door quietly and nestle down into his small, dark, fabric scented sanctuary. On moving day, Ruper ducked into his (now empty) closet one last time, and tried not to cry.
The new neighbourhood was a maze of cul-du-sacs, filled with identical houses, and maple trees pruned like lollipops. Rupert hermitted in the blasting air conditioning and watched people outside.
There was a woman with dark glasses. She walked a little dog, and whenever it got tired, the dog would lay down on its side, and the woman would keep plodding along, dragging it behind her like it was a mop.
There was a boy about Rupert’s age too. He loped lankily along the sidewalk, and always wore his shoes without socks. When he passed, Rupert would withdraw from the window, just in case.
To help Rupert’s listlessness, his parents gifted him a little cage filled with hay, and a wheel, and a clear plastic tube, and a hamster. The hamster was grey with quivering, bulbous black eyes.
Looking at that hamster in that cage all day made Rupert want to scream. In his distress, he left the new house and roamed, pedalling up and down the cul-de-sacs and courts.
This was how Rupert found Wildgrove Creek.
Wildgrove Creek wasn’t very wild, and it wasn’t much of a creek. Rupert only knew it was Wildgrove Creek because of a little sign that said so. Really, it was a cement lined ditch behind a stripmall, with slow, shallow water that trickled and disappeared through some sewer pipes and under the highway.
The creek was smelly, full of blackflies and frogs and a snapping turtle.
Rupert was transfixed.
From atop the cement bank, he watched the turtle float and bask. It had dragon claws and a muscular tail covered in swaying mats of algae. It blinked at him like it had been waiting for a meal since the dawn of time and could wait an eternity more. It was a dinosaur, a hermit, its shelter on its back, its round, reptilian eyes like mossy crystal balls. It was not concerned with the past or future, and it was not afraid.
Over the next days, Rupert told the turtle stories and rolled hotdogs down the side of the basin, watching as the leathery neck extended, the maw gaped, the beak came snapping shut.
“You’re lucky to have a shell,” he told it. “A hiding place wherever you go.”
The turtle blinked up from the cement basin with its ancient swampy eyes.
This went on until the day before Rupert was to start grade 10. That morning, he woke up cold and sweating. He knew that as the school year came on, he would have less time, less energy to see his turtle. This terrified him.
“I’ll just have to bring it here,” he told his bedroom ceiling. “Then I can see it all the time.”
That afternoon, when Rupert biked to Wildgrove Creek, the turtle was waiting for him, water flowing around its shell, staring up with a beatific, benevolent smile.
“I’m going to bring you home,” Rupert said, “I’ll dig you a pond and you can live with me.”
The turtle gazed up at him like a begging dog. It blinked one murky eye, which Rupert took as agreement.
He stooped to grab the snapper, and the turtle, now accustomed to eating hot dogs, extending its leathery neck, gaped its maw, and snapped its jaws shut, lopping off Rupert’s pinky.
Rupert screamed. He stared down at his gushing stump and went weak in the knees.
The turtle blinked up at him lazily.
“Ugh!” Holding his bleeding hand, Rupert stumbled up the bank of the creek. All he wanted was to go home. Not to his new house, but to his real home, his bedroom closet on Finkle street.
But he was losing blood, and he thought he might throw up, and someone else lived there now. He stumbled to the closest house.
“Help!” Rupert screamed.
“Arf!” yapped a dog in response.
Rupert’s heart dropped when he saw who opened the door: the old woman with the dark glasses. Her dog jumped and yapped and snarled .
“My hand!” Cried Rupert. “I need a doctor!”
The old woman couldn’t see Rupert’s mangled hand, but she had a grandson who could, and he retched when he saw it.
He was the lanky boy who wore his shoes without socks. He’d just got his driver’s license. He drove Rupert to the ER and sat with him for nearly eight hours.
Afterwards, the boy called Rupert ‘Stumps.’
The two would sit by the creek and laugh. By October, Rupert walked the cul-de-sacs with ease. By January, they started holding hands, by March, they kissed each other, and by June, the boy graduated. He moved. The two broke up.
The day the boy left, he awkwardly shook Rupert’s pinkiless hand, got into his crappy little car, and left.
“It’s been good, Stumps.”
Rupert sniffed. He cried. He wandered, trying to recapture his heart
Eventually, he found himself on the banks of Wildgrove Creek.
The turtle was long gone, but the trickle of dirty water sparkled, and the gnats hung in shafts of sun as Rupert stepped in. He followed it, through the dark sewer pipes, and under the rushing drone of the highway, and when Rupert emerged into sunlight at the other end of the tunnel, he found the cement lining gone, and his sobbing eased. The creek opened into a river with dappled, mucky banks. A quiet, peaceful place. A sanctuary.
He wondered if he’d become more or less like the turtle in the past year. The question made him smile.
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