Avocadro
I have lied for the past few pages.
I have painted the implication that my life, though lonely and at times suffocating, was peaceful, was without conflict. This is, in part, quite inaccurate. Yes, in many pieces, those almost-two years were docile, calm. But at the very heart of my situations, there was a boy.
His name was Avogadro, and he was rather small.
A few months after the avocado thievery began, he bestowed himself unto my life; and so began the journey of our meetings—a series of duels, though I could hardly refer to them by that name. And he took much pride in defeating me, though I proved to be hardly any competition. I could not accurately describe his powers, but they appeared to be of an inner capacity. Without motion, his power was brought hither and bound me with such a force that I, unable to resist, would collapse nearly immediately. I know not of how his powers came to be, and such questions will remain unanswered. But his control over the avocados, and only the avocados, seemed to define my torment.
Avogadro seemed a regular boy, but I had never spotted him interacting with any person else. Our meetings seemed to happen at random chance, but would happen as sparsely as fortnightly and as often as every day.
I often enountered him in the schoolyard, for I was still a schoolboy. Our of the corner of my eye, I could see him approaching. He had a distinct figure, a body smaller than any other middle-schoolboy, and I recognized him immediately.
He would bring me to an unvisited terrain, a dry and sandy landscape that could not have been in our small town. Despite its orange tones, it was always filled with an icy fog. I could feel it deep in my bones. The land was always littered with avocados, more than I had ever been accused of stealing in my lifetime, but I had no urge to pick them there. Their existence, I always assumed, was simply to taunt me, a painful reminder of what had become of my early adolescent life.
And the Cold—the Cold, it nearly froze me. For Avogadro’s power was a deep association with the Cold. While it did not seem to be under his control, every element of the landscape had the Cold. I would bury myself underneath the sand, for their yellow-orange hues deceivingly promised me warmth. Yet the sands, like the air and the fog, only enveloped me in Cold.
Perhaps worst was the avocados, whose Cold was strongest than anything else. Just one brush over their skins would create an icy sensation that could spread over my entire body. For this reason, I avoided the avocados entirely when inside Avogadro’s terrain.
I never touched Avogadro himself, but his pale white body suggested to me that he too had Cold—almost certainly more than the avocados. I stayed far from him. The Cold uprooted me of my consciousness, and I woke up shivering back in my small town.