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“Little Master is doing it again.“
“Let’s not tell the Miss, for his sake.“
“If only he could watch cartoons like a real kid.“
“Let’s just pretend that he is, to make us and the Miss feel better.“

While he heard the two maids hoarsely whispering to each other in their not-so-hushed tones, he pretended not to care. If they were kind enough to sympathize with him, he would not complain. In fact, he felt extremely grateful for the two maids, who could understand that he needed to be this way more than anything in the world. His round light-brown eyes remained fixed to the television in front of him, with his short 8-year old legs hanging over the couch and small 8-year old hands gripping the remote so tightly that — had they not been 8-years old, could have crushed it to pieces.

On one side of the flat-screen plasma television stood a clean-cut woman dressed in a pale pink dress-suit and white heels with her microphone held tightly up to her mouth, a complete contrast to the blackened and muddy backdrop of which she stood. The boy, and nearly every other citizen in the country would recognize this woman, had they even watched the news once in their lives. She was the pale and delicate Miss Zhang, whose speech was clear as the waters of Hunan and rang louder than all of the angry mother’s in China.

In her strong newscaster voice, newscaster tone, and newscaster stare, she went on to report about the disaster that had recently happened in one of the mines of northeastern China, a disaster in which 57 miners had been killed in yet another tragic accident. This time, a group of miners had accidentally tunneled into a flooded mine shaft located next to their own. The veteran miners seen rushing around behind her were men that had been assigned to search for the bodies of the 57 unfortunate men, whose young lives had been accidentally swept up along with the greed of the local mine owners.

He watched as Miss Zhang carefully approached one of the black figures scuttling along with their work in the background. The only reason why anyone could, and would, believe that they too were humans, was because the man Miss Zhang approached knew how to answer her. ‘So he does know human-speech.‘ Miss Zhang must have thought — thought the boy, but his eyes were no longer fixed on her, but on the man that now stood next to her. When the man turned his blackened face and body towards Miss Zhang, the boy could clearly see his wide and bloodshot eyes, more noticeable than ever compared to the rest of his coal-dusted body. If it had not been for the white of his eyes and pink of the inside of his mouth — one could truly believe that this man was not a man at all, but in fact, a shadow.

His voice was gruff and his speech barely audible, as if the sides of his throat were strangling his vocal cords. The boy could tell that Miss Zhang was trying her best not to step away, nor let her expression of disgust slip through her porcelain face that had gone through two hours worth of make-up beforehand. Miss Zhang continued to nod with a false look of concern plastered on her face — a look that no one else except the boy could have noticed a fault in. Despite the fact that she could not understand a word of the thickly-accented dialect that came out of the man’s mouth, Miss Zhang continued to feign interest.

But the boy understood his words clearly, and had he not been a “man”, he would have let those tears well up in his eyes and run down those still-soft baby cheeks of his. Yet he was a man, and instead, the boy opted to bury those tears deep within his body, perhaps in his appendix that had been cut out the year before. The boy did not simply understand the man’s speech, but the boy recognized him and yearned with all his heart that he could jump into the high-tech television screen and bawl his eyes out on the harsh, once navy-blue, cloth of the man’s shirt. But the television screen proved to be a strong barrier and the cloth remained thickly covered and weighed down by years and hours of coal dust. The boy would recognize this man anywhere and anytime of the day. Through the image on the television, he could recognize each and every coal-dust filled wrinkle and crease that lined the man’s face. The wild man on television was his father — his real father; the father than told him that he was a man and that men did not cry.

‘Together they only averaged 28 years old, they were so young.‘
That was what his father had said. His father also mentioned his older brother, who had died in an explosion two-and-a-half years ago at the age of 26 — the year he had been put up for adoption.

Miss Zhang turned back to the camera to read the facts written on cue-cards by one of the staff members, and the cameraman moved to cut his father out of the picture.
‘…data concludes that a total of 3,000 fellow miners have died in the last year and…‘

‘No you wretched hag,‘ the boy thought to himself. ‘11,400 have died.‘
‘Add 800 and multiply by three‘, that was what his real mother always said to him.

Soon, Miss Zhang signed off on her live-report and the television flashed back to display the daily stock market rises and falls, which would then be followed by the weather forecast. But the boy didn’t care for what he could already predict, and threw the remote to the other side of the massive couch. He heard the familiar swish of the front doors opening and the jingling of keys.

“Young Master, you’re father is home,” one of the maid’s chimed from the next room.
“It’s I who should be going home to my father,” he said before running up the maze of stairs that would eventually lead him to his room.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4