INSIGHT: THE ELF

Andy had loved Lina with all his heart and now here he was sitting in a dark abandoned cabin in the woods.  His body was covered in dirt and blood as he rocked back and forth in a rickety old chair.

They had grown up together, however, as a little boy he always knew he was different.  The other children taunted and teased him, but, all of their cruelty melted away when she would place her hand on his face and caress his ears.  She would gently rub his head and tell him everything was going to be just fine.

School was always a problem for Andy.  It was never the classwork or the home assignments, just the other children and their mocking of him.  Sometimes they made fun of his clothes, his height and eyes and always his ears, which earned him the nickname “Elf.”  He knew he wasn’t like them, but he didn’t need to be reminded of it every day.  The worst of them was Roman.  He truly enjoyed torturing Andy, and saw to it that every day was another personal hell for him.  It was always the same, day after day, week after week and year after year.  Taunts, practical jokes and teasing, followed by the soothing affection of the girl with whom he had fallen in love.

Lina’s parents were fond of him since he was a little boy.  He had stayed in their guest house after his parents had met with an unfortunate accident.  They gave him a place to stay, kept him fed and had even given him his name.

As fate would have it one day the taunting began again. It was Roman’s boys, and there would be no Lina to comfort Andy this time.  It was unbearable.  The pushing and the shoving…the name calling, it had all been building up to this point.  The pictures, the jokes, the stupid nicknames they had for come up with for years haunted him.  Pushing, smacking, spitting, tripping, it was all happening again and now it was too much to bear.  Somewhere deep inside him he felt something snap.  Unlike the countless other instances over the years, this time it didn’t end with him walking away with his head down to a background filled with their laughter.  Instead he walked with his head high, to the background music…

…of their screams.

As he approached home that night, there was a heaviness in his heart.  Andy knew he couldn’t stay in his town anymore after what he’d done and more importantly he would never see Lina again.  As he stopped by the house to say his goodbyes, he heard a familiar laugh coming from Lina’s room.  Then he saw her, Lina…

…in Roman’s arms.

Everything went red.  Lina didn’t see Andy the way he saw her.  All those years together he had thought that she had cared about him.  All that time he had spent hoping that one day there might be a chance that they could be with one another.

Lina looked at Andy with pity in her eyes, like you would at a small injured dog.  In a condescending way she began to speak to him by saying that she assumed with his intelligence he would get it by now.  That he should have realized the truth after all of these years.  She began to ask him who were his parents? How did they die?  Did he even remember them or their funeral?  She said to him, “You stayed in our shed behind our home and we never even fed you food.”  He didn’t care about those things right now.  All he knew was that the woman of his dreams was in the arms of his nightmares.

“You’re not real, Andy…

…you’re an E.L.F.”

What was she saying?  She just called him an Elf?  The same name that Roman and his goons had called him for years was now coming out from her lips. At this point it seemed as if he had shut down…he could no longer hear her words, nor did he want to and Lina failed to see the change in him as his eyes began to glow.

By the time they found their bodies…

…the Exotic Lifelike Fabrication had already made his way deep into the woods.

“Everything I know has been a lie.” —And(y) Roid