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 its own dark realities. 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 that came to mind for Dr. Sid. In less than ten minutes from now, Dr. Sid would recite the words he recites to each shadow boy he processes: In you go, so you’ll see, to the well-away, my goodbye boy. Here in The Shallows, color-leaked bodies are drained of their remaining light, years swallowed whole without so much of a sound. This silent fight to forget would soon be over,
As he took a bite of his lunch of steamed broccoli, Dr. Sid considered a few other descriptions to write on the intake form: 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. It’s hard to resist the feeling of new thought, especially if you spend as much time alone as Dr. Sid does. He could taste the fresh temperature of this phrase, but ultimately scratched it out, realizing it had more to do with him — and his own story here to The Weatherburn — than this boy of pedestrian chest before him. 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.