Martin was playing with a fluffy pink stuffed animal while listening to the soundtrack of a movie his parents must have been watching in another room.
The Music Man. The part where Marion the Librarian tried to keep the second sleazy salesman from going after the first sleazy salesman, who she’d fallen in love with, by flirting with the second sleazy salesman. The second sleazy salesman kept calling her a strictly G-rated “girly girl.”
But there was absolutely nothing bloody G-rated about what his parents were calling Marion the Librarian, or their suggestions about what the second sleazy salesman should do to her. And were those even his parents watching The Music Man in the other room? There were a whole lot of male voices and no female ones in the audience.
Where was he?
For a moment he saw the bars and the trail of blood leading toward him and realized he was on the floor again, and that he wasn’t alone. An unbearable despair, far deeper and more painful than the most acute pain, forced an endless moan so unfathomable that it seemed to erupt from his bone marrow. A consummately cruel and oily voice breathed directly into his ear, “Beginning to like it now, aren’t you…”
Then he was playing with his fluffy pink stuffed animal again, a pudgy-cute T-rex that was winking furiously at him.
“Little boy…”
That consummately cruel and oily voice! Where did it come from? Didn’t matter. Couldn’t matter. Martin concentrated on the undulating patterns in his little-boy wallpaper, clutching the winking T-rex. Desperately he tried to calculate how long until the end of The Music Man, knowing all the overly loud movie soundtracks drowned out and concealed…other sounds.
