On boyhood, shadow, and dreams.
Bretty received an MFA from The New School in Creative Writing in 2015, and has published writing in PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, Narratively, Nowhere Magazine, among others. Bretty is currently at work on a fiction manuscript (a duology) called, Shadow Boys, which follows the journey of “The Goodbye Boys,” four cul-de-sac kids who, on the same morning, wake up without their shadow. In search of their sunshine self, each boy navigates the shadow world — The Weatherburn — a little differently, as the world itself wakes up to the dark reality of how we truly treat our children. What will the shadow boys find, if they make it back into the world of light? Is there a place in the future for these pasts? What’s the difference between a shadow and a ghost? When did this epidemic of shadowless boys begin, and will there ever be someone big enough to blame?
Shadow Boys
an excerpt
“When the boy arrived, he was the color of slush.
Liquid bone is first color Dr. Sid thought to write down on the newly-arrived’s intake form, In less than ten minutes from now, Dr. Sid would recite the words he’d recite to each shadow boy he processed here — In you go, so you’ll see, to the well-away, my goodbye boy — as their color-leaked bodies were drained of what remaining light there was, years swallowed whole without so much of a sound, for this silent fight to forget would soon be finally over,
Dr. Sid considered a few other descriptions, as he took a bite of his lunch of steamed broccoli: windshield rain, pan-fried cement, charcoal tooth, and perhaps one of his favorites he’d thought of in a while, ash-icle. In fact, Dr. Sid wrote that one down first — ash’icle — which was smile enough. It’s hard to resist the feeling of an utterly new thought, especially if you spend as much time alone as Dr. Sid does down here in what others call the shallows. There was a freshness to the phrase, ashicle, that Dr. Sid could taste with the lick of his tongue, but he scratched it out, acknowledging that it had more to do with him — and his own story here to The Weatherburn — than this boy of pedestrian chest before him, and in that unspoken pause, two words floated slowly down from the ceiling of eyelids: erased tongue.
“This way,” Dr. Sid, said, smiling with a mouthful of little green trees, and he guided the boy to his first stop: The Library of Darkness.”
This painting is by Carmen Cano, which hangs in Bretty’s office.