The Apricot Boy: A Novella

"The visual descriptions and breadth of it are stunning...reminds me of the Alchemist or Khalil Gibran, with better writing." Derek Murphy (Best-Selling Author)

"The Apricot Boy," by Beard Bates, is a contemporary myth, an imaginative novella outside of time and space, that weaves the tales of a child who was predestined to wander, to enchant, and strangely pay some unknown price for being himself. A fractured and surreal love story between a boy and the girl next door; a story from the heart of dreams, which itself dreams to discover a truth of the universal heart; shape-shifting surreal mythology in the form of a ball of yarns...this is "The Apricot Boy."

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The boy was alive and asleep when the sand-bank began to nudge its way into his dreams. The premonition of himself as himself was there, in between the dreamt images and his wakeful breathing, inside his little child-head, under the thick shock of yellow hair, inside his dreams of mountains and open skies and sea-birds. Then he realized his mother was there. She had begun to appear midst a radiant orchard unlike any he had ever seen or hoped to imagine. He said it was in the morning that he first noticed there were arbors on either side of the bed and that fruit-trees bowed to canopy over the little gravel walkway his duvet resembled as it stretched to become the ground upon which his mother stood. And she would begin repeating eleven words while walking towards the boy. After uttering the eleventh word she would be instantaneously placed back in the spot from which she began. It seemed to the boy, under the shadow cast by enormous wings of imagined frigate birds and the sinking and rising of mountains and waves, that each time the last word gave way to the first there was some sort of rupture of worlds, an earthquake inside the air as if a sheet of glass were broken and at the same time replaced before one's eyes, or maybe even inside one's eyes. However, the boy began to realize the world was subservient to her words, that it was obliged to re-begin when they did, those which were softly delivered under her breath but nonetheless bursting to ooze with the same sanguine maternal energy that drips from such women like his mother, those whom a even stiff breeze can make pregnant. She said, "Llanotenga, you are half-Indian and an emperor lost in time." Though it would not be long before the boy would come to realize something, one particular something, and in such a harsh way that from his own future would be eliminated any ability for error. He could only grow to realize that there was no escape from such strange luck as his own.

For fans of literary fiction, imaginative realism, desert fiction, novellas and short stories, wanderer extinction fiction, imaginative artistic books, and the StorytellerUK2021 contest winners.