[04/22/2026]

[FICTION]

Ignore It and It Goes Away

by Luc M

Dylan

No one knows where he came from. He just walked in. The garage door was open. It was late spring. Sometimes my coworkers’ kids are here, so maybe everyone assumed he belonged to someone else, because he went mostly unnoticed. He walked into our office and just stood there, he was about ten or eleven. I assumed he was someone’s kid or nephew or something. He kept staring at me. I thought he was on the spectrum or something, so I ignored it. Everyone did. In fact, one of my coworkers' kids was already there. She was out of sight, in the warehouse. About the same age as the kid, maybe a little younger. It was close to the end of the day. This is where things went wrong. 

We had an electric kettle high on a shelf, don’t ask me why it wasn’t in a better spot, and it was boiling. In the warehouse I heard the girl scream for help, so I rushed over. When I got to her, she didn’t appear to be in any danger at all. She said, “I meant help from my dad.” 

I walked back and saw the kid, claimed by no one, reaching for the kettle. I was too late. The boiling water fell all over his face. Obviously, this would do a lot of damage, but it was worse than I expected. The burns immediately distorted him, but he barely reacted. 

“I tried to warn him,” my coworker said. “Who even is he?” 

“You don’t know him?” 

“No, I thought you did.” 

I called the ambulance. He looked like he had been in a fire. I’m not sure how a normal burn is supposed to look, but I know this was worse. All he does is stare, with the swelling his eyes are just pin pricks in a mess of skin. After everything, a doctor is asking me where he came from, and I don’t know. He tells me that somehow, the kid's tongue is burnt out, and he can’t speak anymore, though I didn’t hear him say anything before this happened either. The doctor encourages the kid to write down who his parents are, but he just sits there blankly, doing nothing. We wait a long while, then the doctor said he’ll file a missing child report and take the kid to the police station. The kid doesn’t like this idea, apparently, and writes: No parents. They’re missing. 

“Missing, huh?” the doctor said. “You believe that?” 

“I don’t know. He just walked into my job. I have no idea who he is.” He wrote some more: He has to take care of me now. 

“Me?”

He nodded. I felt sorry for this kid. I believed he had nowhere else to go, and honestly I didn’t want him to go to the police or to an orphanage or wherever missing kids go. I felt responsible for what happened to him. So since then, he still hasn’t spoken a word. The doctor said with speech therapy he could go back to normal. I tried to learn sign language, but he won’t try. He doesn’t even write things down anymore. I don’t know if this kid was ever normal. I don’t know what to do. He just follows me around everywhere. He goes to work with me, and we all just pretend he’s a really young looking adult. We have him pretend to work. We all think it’s our fault and live with it. It’s been a year, and everyone has stopped trying. It’s just normal now. 

Connie

I feel bad for Dylan. I know he thinks it’s his fault that this kid was injured. When he was first burnt, it was like a mask of burnt flesh around his eyes. It was pretty terrifying. Like, uncanny or something. We had him wear a mask to cover it, which was almost worse, and I felt bad for this boy. If he’s injured, shouldn’t we have the decency of being able to look him in the eye? But we couldn’t look at him at all. I kept trying to tell Dylan to put this boy in foster care or something, but he feels like he has to take care of him. I thought he should be in school. This can't go on like this forever. But we let it go on, because no one wants to do anything about it. I have kids of my own, so I don’t have time to do anything about it. That’s what makes it all worse: I know how hard life is for him, and how it’s going to be. The day it happened, I was there. I was the one who turned the kettle on in the first place. I saw him reach for it and warned him, and then he seemed to start to leave it alone, so I went back to work. This is why I feel bad for Dylan, and why I think something strange is going on here. When he walked back into the room, barely in the doorway, the boy went right back to the kettle, looked at him, then tipped it over. It almost looked purposeful to me, but I could never suggest that. Now Dylan carries this guilt around with him all the time. He’s only twenty-six, single as far as I know, and for the past year he’s been sort of like a father to this random child. Strangely, over this year, pieces of the burnt skin came off to reveal a more normal, though thin and slightly red, face. The mask wasn’t needed anymore. Anyone who saw him wouldn’t know immediately that anything had happened to him. 

“I’ve been sort of teaching him how to do my job,” Dylan told me. 

“He needs to go to school. You shouldn’t do this to yourself. It isn’t your responsibility.” 

“It kind of is.” 

“How? It’s no one’s fault. If anything, it’s my fault. I was there too.” 

“Yeah, but he wanted me to stop it from happening. Not anyone else.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” 

“You don’t have to understand it.” 

The kid just follows him around. There was nothing anyone could do about it. It wasn’t our problem. Maybe he was right, it was his responsibility, and he had to figure out what to do with it on his own. 

Hope

I only started interning two weeks ago. I don’t mention the kid. He sits at his own desk. Maybe he’s not as young as he looks? But he definitely looks twelve or thirteen. There’s a young man who works here. The kid, who might not be a kid, follows him out when he leaves, and walks in with him in the morning. It was definitely weird. I had a bad feeling about it, but I couldn’t figure out why. I saw Dylan alone, near my desk, which is separate from all of the other desks, in another room. He’s almost never alone, so I approached him. It was weird, because I usually never ask people about things like this. Like, if someone was missing a limb, you don’t go and ask them what happened. 

“Who is that, that comes in with you?” I asked 

“He’s, uh, my kid I guess.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Well, I don’t really know who he is. I just take care of him.” 

“Why?” 

“Someone has to.” 

“So how do you live?” 

“He just does what I do.” 

“How long have you been doing that?” 

“A year, I think, at least.” 

“And how long are you going to take care of him? Shouldn’t you figure out something else to do with him? Sorry to be forward, but—” 

“No, I don’t know. I just figured he’d go away.”

LUC M is a writer and musician in NYC. He’s the founder of Moral Crema art collective.