Little Boy's Laugh

Little Boy’s Laugh

The waves gently kissed the sides of the ship; beating out a steady rhythm as the ship slid smoothly through the murky depths of the sea. A man leaning upon a rail sighed; fingers restlessly running through his hair, the only signs of inner turmoil. His eyes gazed out to the distant horizon, searching for something that seemed always to elude him, slipping forever out of his reach.

It had begun as a mission, a mission of a desperate, disillusioned man. Reclusive and introverted he had long lost any connection with the outside world. This ‘holiday’ had been an excuse for him to re-enter a world which he had no longer any familiarity or understanding of. He had treated the holiday as a time of reconnaissance. He needed to gather information on the world; people and the intricate web of right and wrong; ideals and beliefs; thoughts and perceptions that human society was made up of.

He watched daily the unique and bizarre interactions of an equally unique and bizarre people that comprised of the members aboard the cruise ship. It was during one of these observations that ‘the Event’ occurred. A faint smile played upon the man’s lips as the memory of the incident came back to him.

The day had begun as many before it with the sun rising and the breeze blowing; however that day was destined to be different. Taking up his normal station around the pool he had watched once more. He had begun to tire of the people, feeling slightly sickened by the view of many a bare-chested middle aged man with a saggy and pale body; turning away with barely concealed disgust, a movement had caught his eye. Following it he found a little boy no more than six years old wrestling vigorously with a bottle of sunscreen. He watched for a while certain the boy’s mother would rush over to help him. As time passed he realised that the mother wasn’t coming.

He had stood up; hardly believing at the time he was doing it, and walked swiftly over to the boy. Gently prying the bottle from the boy’s fingers, he flicked open the lid and handed it back to the boy. The boy’s hands clutched at the bottle, staring blankly at it before blinking and gazing up at him. A smile had appeared on the boy’s face, growing larger before bursting open into peals of delighted laughter.

The man had stepped back, unsure how to react to such a display of emotion. Sensing the man’s insecurity the boy had offered him a hesitant smile; he had turned away then and begun to walk away, glancing over his shoulder. He saw the boy gazing wide-eyed at the bottle before promptly squirting its contents all over him self.

The man had been startled to find him self smiling at the boy’s antics. A hand grazed over his lips in wonderment, the smile grew until a chuckle fought itself up his throat and escaped between his smiling lips; chuckling the man had walked away from the little boy and the bottle of sunscreen.

The man blinked seeing once more the star-studded sky and moon-laced water before him as the scene faded once more into memory. He had set out on the trip with the intentions to re-enter the outside world using plans and careful observations and had instead found the outside world creep up on him not in the form of imitation or through the understating of the interactions between people but instead in the form of a little boy’s laugh.