Michael Raleigh - In the Castle of the Flynns

“What? Nothing happened to me … Oh.” He laughed, a short little bark. “I cut myself shaving. It’s nothing. Some day you’ll be able to shave and then you’ll get all these little cuts on your face.”

“Do they hurt?”

“No, but if I’m not careful, I could lose enough blood to die.”

“You could?”

“Nah, I’m just kidding.” He surveyed the living room for a moment and a tiny patch of bloody tissue came loose and fluttered down to the floor like the last red leaf of autumn. If I close my eyes I can still see him coming out with a dozen patched cuts, looking like something out of an old Ed Wood movie— The Bleeding Men from Outer Space , perhaps, or Attack of the People with Open Sores .

“So how ’bout some comics? Man needs some reading material when he sits on the throne.”

“He does?”

“Sure. Some things you should never be in a hurry for. Going to the can is one of them.”

“They’re by my bed.” In the tiny half-room at the front of the house where I slept, I had just enough room for my bed, a small dresser, a toybox and two cardboard cartons, one for my soldiers and the other for my comics. I had hundreds, I bought them constantly or people bought them for me and I never threw them away: at the Certified on the corner of Barry and Leavitt they sold old ones without covers, three comics to a pack for a dime.

I had Archie and Walt Disney comics, Superman and Blackhawk and the occasional bloodthirsty war comic like G.I. Comics, horror comics I didn’t even understand and nearly fifty Classics Illustrated—all purchased by my grandmother lest Archie and Jughead cause an atrophy of my young brain.

Tom disappeared with his leprous face into my room for several minutes and I heard him exclaiming at my collection. He emerged with the Classics Illustrated version of “Ivanhoe” and told me he could be found “in the library.” From that day on, I seldom spent more than five minutes in the bathroom without one of my comics, his purloined habit becoming my custom for life and occasioning many fierce debates between me and my grandparents, who contended that I now took half an hour to do thirty seconds’ business.

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