Goats from Lambs

Chapter 2

Victor Ecclestone stood at the foot of his bed in the residence of St. Christopher's Church, staring blankly into the depths of the empty suitcase that was laid out before him.

In his hand, Victor fiddled with a two-inch wooden figurine of a parrot with a bandage over its broken wing as he took a deep breath and attempted to swallow the pain of the moment.

* * *

From the age of two, Victor had been bounced around the foster system like a warped pinball that couldn't find its target. There had been a few hopeful moments here and there, where adoption appeared to be on the horizon, but whenever the topic of his birth parents' came up, the decision was promptly re-considered.

Victor was obviously too young to recall the night he was found sleeping on top of his mother's lifeless body; his father, a few feet away, laying face down in a pool of his own blood. Nevertheless, yuppie paranoia of a potentially dominant 'murder suicide gene' always resulted in Victor remaining trapped within the system, watching both his youth and hopes for a normal life simultaneously fade away with each rejection.

So, once Victor turned eighteen, the foster system gladly washed their hands of him and dumped him out onto the street with no direction, no assistance and no sense of structure in his life. The only gift that had been bestowed upon him was a standardized GED from court-appointed home educators who cared more about their next paycheck than the welfare of a child that nobody wanted.

Put simply, Victor was merely another dirty Band-Aid pulled off the city's knee and thrown into the trash.

Victor's first few months on the street were the hardest. Learning the 'laws' of the back alleys required numerous trials, resulting mostly in errors; errors that typically came in the form of Victor lying in a corner, bruised, bleeding, and covered in some crack head's piss, if only that.

One such night had resulted in Victor finding himself lying on the front steps of St. Christopher's church, awaiting his final breath.

Victor's most recent offence had been picking a quarter up, off the sidewalk between 22ndStreet and Main Avenue. This was promptly corrected with a sucker punch from a drug-fueled rhinoceros named Melvin, who then dragged Victor down a nearby alleyway, pinning him down so that his spindly, toothless girlfriend, 'Trix' could stab Victor repeatedly in the side with her broken crack pipe.

The last thing Victor remembered was submitting to the pain, relaxing his body, and listening to the fading sound of Trix's malicious laughter while he felt his life slowly pour out of him.

Possibly due to the lack of blood and fading consciousness, as Melvin held him down, Victor saw a brief vision of Trix smoking from her pipe, dancing while she exhaled, only it felt as though Victor, somehow, was seeing it through Melvin's point of view.

Shooting awake later that night, with no idea of how much time had passed, Victor tried to sit up only to feel the wound in his side resisting. It almost felt as though it were drooling acid, the pain causing his vision to blur momentarily.

Victor tried to focus his energy as he fought through the pain and brought himself into a sitting position, pausing for a moment mid-way to catch what little breath he had.

From what he could see in the wash of the soft glow of the streetlights spilling into the alleyway, Melvin and Trix were passed out, a few feet from him; most likely the result of a celebratory hit after Victor's body had gone limp, but close enough that Victor assumed his vision was just a momentary wave of consciousness that he brain had twisted the memory of.