Blurred Capacity

1

Light was only just cutting through the plain white curtains of the barricaded bedroom when the sleeping brunette stirred from his disturbed night's sleep. He had been having the same recurring nightmare for weeks now. He was locked in his room by his parents and the walls enclosed on him, getting closer and closer until they crushed him into a splat of blood, guts and bone in the gap between the opposite wall and the door. His brain was always the last thing to be destroys though. Maybe that emphasised his concentration on the vital organ every day. After all he didn't ever speak to his parents, and they only ever spoke to him if they needed to tell him something, but they wouldn't talk normally to their son - they would shout. And yell, and scream. Throw things at him and call him a freak because that's what he was.

He believed it now. Everything they said was true. He was a monster and he didn't deserve to live and he shouldn't exist at all because there's no one else like him. He knew that the word matching that description was "unique". The teenager thought that was a negative word as they were using its description to describe him. And he knew that they hated him. He was the child that his mother wished she had never given birth to. Both his parents wished they hadn't conceived him and wished when he was born that they sent him away for adoption. They just wanted rid of the constant burden on their lives which was their own son.

His mother, Freya. She just didn't understand why her baby was like this. She had loved and cared and protected him until he was two years old when he never said mama. Instead her precious boy had recited a mathematical infinite number but had stopped, later in life claiming that that was the number in its entirety because according to his stupidly intelligent mind it wasn't actually infinite. Others were just too lazy to figure out the rest of the numbers, he had claimed.

Her boy was ill, she had assumed. He didn't actually know pi to all of its places. So she took him to the doctor's office. The doctor claimed that the boy might have a fever and so prescribed medicine for him. But when Freya came home one day to find her son kneeling on a chair in front of his father's piano playing high tempo compositions as quick as a whip, she had to convince herself that there was something more going on.

Her and her husband, Liam, both travelled to the next country to meet with a child psychiatrist in the hope that they would get some answers. The toddler had sat on his mother's knee, happily playing with his two stuffed animals that they had allowed him to take so as to avoid a fit of crying and whining before they even got out of the house never mind the country.

Despite speaking a different language, the man they were going to visit could see the pain in their eyes at the thought of their son having something wrong with his brain.

This was the first and only doctor to tell them that their son was genius. A prodigy at four years old. The doctor claimed he was a miracle. A gift bestowed upon them from whatever God he believed in. And the young boy had no idea what he was saying as he placed a hand on his forehead and prayed that he would progress well in life and would help the world rid itself of sins.

Freya and Liam were disgusted. Both had grown up in Christian households where other religions were frowned upon and called fake, so they carried on those ideals with them. After criticising the one doctor that had faith in their son - all for having a differing belief set to their own - they left that clinic.

Continuing on for a year after that, there was never another doctor who claimed their boy was a miracle. Never another who called him unique or incredible or a gift. There were a few who prayed but those who did so did out of fear for their own lives. They thought that the toddler was the devil incarnate and should be murdered violently with various different mythological weapons that were within their religion that banished evil from the realm of the living or this side of heaven and hell. Whatever they called it.