The Everlast - Here and There and Elsewhere #01

(B. Schatz)

The Everlast - Chapter Two - Here and There and Elsewhere #01
by B. Schatz

Back Then and There

Exactly forty-two days before, Peter Torrington was poking at his food with sheer disinterest. He was troubled quite deeply.

“I am troubled,” Peter mused, “Quite deeply.”

“Eat yer food,” his father stated gruffly while he shovelled through his own plate of food.

It had become the standard response to whatever Peter would say while at the dinner table.

“My toes are itchy.”

“Eat yer food.”

“Jordan told me that his dad thinks that you might think that he might think you’re crazy, because Jordan thinks you are.”

“Eat yer food.”

“I miss mom.”

“…don’ talk about yer mother that way.”

A pause.

“Now eat yer food.”

Peter’s father was not a warm man by any stretch of the imagination, a fact that Peter didn’t find entirely gratifying.

“I’m not hungry,” Peter mumbled.

“Eat yer food.”

“But if I do, I’ll explode and then I’d be dead,” Peter complained.

“Not likely,” his father grumbled as he stuck the last item of food that resided on his plate with his fork, and dropped it into his mouth.

“Are you still hungry?” Peter asked.

“Been workin’ all day. ‘Course I’m hungry.”

“You can have the rest of my food.”

“You will have the rest of your food.”

“It will just go to waste in my belly,” Peter claimed, “because it doesn’t want any more food, and it’ll just get rid of it later.”

Peter’s father eyed the plate of food.

“’Spose you’ve ate enough for the size of you,” he reasoned, grabbing the plate.

“Thank you dad.”

“Mff,” his dad replied, mouth full of food.

Peter slid away from the table and scurried out of the dining area door, emerging at a long hallway, made entirely out of wood. This wasn’t an unexpected sight to Peter, because he had seen this place with his own two eyes practically every single day he had been alive.

It was the main corridor of his father’s ship, which he had christened “The Everlast” on the day that Peter had been born.

“Look at our beautiful baby boy,” his mother had cooed, cradling Peter in her arms while lying comfortably on the snug hospital bed, “Isn’t he absolutely beautiful?”

Peter’s father grunted in recognition, and then changed the topic.

“I named the boat today.”

“Which boat, dear?”

“The family boat.”

“We have a boat?”

“We do now,” his father explained, “Have to have a place big enough an’ safe enough to raise a family, an’ a boat’s just the thing that’ll do it.”

“Charles, just because you were raised on a boat, doesn’t mean that every child should be,” she said, “Besides, I don’t like boats. They creak and they rock and they’re dangerous when there are storms. We could all drown and die or worse.”

“No we won’t,” he stated curtly, “You haven’t seen a finer boat, handcrafted by the finest boat craftsman in the whole of Everything.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“You’ve been building this boat in your spare time? Behind my back?”

“I build boats for a living,” he explained, “I paid myself for it, an’ worked on it at work. Didn’t hurt no one.”

“Charles…”

“Thought you might want to name it, seeings how I built it for you an’ the boy, an’ seeings how I’m not too good with the names and such,” he said.

His wife paused and thought.

“You really have your mind set on this, don’t you?”

He said nothing, and she sighed.

“The Everlast.”

He took a deep breath in through his nose, and stood up.

“Right. I’ll go paint ‘er on the side of the boat.”

They moved on the boat one day later, and a good forty-two days shy of ten and a half years later, Peter was running down the length of the boat to get to his room.

Arriving at this door, Peter took a quick glance down the hall to make sure that his father hadn’t decided better of his decision to let Peter go about the ship and followed. There was no sign of the big man.

With the thought that no one was watching him safely tucked into a fold of his brain, he quickly opened the door a crack, slipped inside, and closed it once again.

He breathed a sigh of relief as he turned around to face his room.

It was a little dark, as the tiny circular glass window at the side of his room showed the sun sinking low in the sky, so he made his way towards the desk that he kept in the far right corner of the room, careful not to trip on any of the items that he quite carelessly left on the floor.

Upon reaching the desk, he opened the top right drawer and pried open the false bottom, and took out a box of matches. He lit the lamp and it cast the entire room into a warm glow.

The light was comforting.

Now able to see much better, he walked over to his bed and crouched beside it, reaching below to extract a large paper map that he had created of Everything. Or rather, the amount of Everything that he had seen in his lifetime.

The drawing extended from one side to the other, and while several markings and doodles that applied to specific places were quite prevalent in several far-flung places, an entire half of the picture remained quite empty. Yes, it was true that living on a boat made it easy to travel the world, going from port to port and town to town as one pleased, and it was true that, as boat making work dried up in the various locales, Peter and his dad had would go to other places, however his father absolutely REFUSED to cross the line between Here and There.

He refused to tell Peter why that was, and Peter knew better than to ask.

But that didn’t stop Peter from thinking about how it would be like over on the other side. He had heard tales of wonderful things: Of souring dragons, of powerful wizards and of any number of fantastic beings that his little mind could only dream about.

One day, he knew that he would venture to the other side, and glimpse at their kind of life. He would go on grand adventures and explore the world beyond the one he knew, and become a person of myth and legend, to be whispered about and admired

Yes, one day, he would do it all: Because nothing could’ve been worse than his current mundane existence.