muses in the mist

Malfred had always been unlucky.  His bad luck began the day he was born and his mother named him Malfred.  In her as-yet-undiagnosed schizophrenic ranting, she assured the incredulous nurses that it was an old family name.  Yes, they replied, and perhaps it should stay that way, but she could not be swayed.

Possibly due to his unfortunate name, and more possibly due to the pernicious influence of mental illness on every aspect of life, Malfred learned to temper his expectations from an early age.  He became a sort of virtuoso of bad news, riding the crest of each wave of disaster with an expertise usually found in people who drive extremely fancy but tasteful automobiles.

His even reaction to catastrophe, while laudable, did little to endear him to his classmates.  Throughout his childhood, Malfred was perplexed to observe the growth of social bonds all around him, which nevertheless always seemed to fail to grow in his direction.  He was well known as a harbinger of destruction, and though he always emerged more-or-less unscathed, those in his proximity rarely considered themselves the better off, and he had no friends.

This sorry state of affairs lasted roughly until the end of the most awkward stages of puberty in Malfred's cohort, when two events occurred, roughly simultaneously, that, as far as Malfred was concerned, Put Him On The Map.

The first of these was the sudden, complete, and final mental breakdown ("episode") of Malfred's mother, who discovered one of Malfred's pubic hairs on the bathroom floor and, before she knew it, had made the mental leap to scaling Mt. Everest in her holy quest to spare her son from the ravages of adulthood by, basically, interring him in a monastery at the top.  That there was no monastery, no mountain, and possibly no pubic hair did not dissuade her, and the fire department had to be called to pry her off of the chimney.

With a kindly uncle's guidance, Malfred successfully had himself emancipated, and had his mother indefinitely committed to an institution which would be far better suited to deal with her unique perspective on reality than her sixteen-year-old son could.

The very afternoon of her fatefully imagined climb, just two hours before Malfred returned home to discover the liberating scene, he had met the first love of his life.  Her name was Tuva, and she knew how to look at him in a way that completely disarmed him.  She disregarded the aura of misfortune he carried, as overwhelmed by the power of youthful hormones as he, and they began a relationship.

There are two more stories like this in Malfred's life, similar enough to elide.  They happened years later, and apart, and affected him in much the same way.  He never forgot those girls, even after he had been so long separated from them, ages past when the cruel happenstances of his life had driven them far from his side, so that only a wisp of their light and laughter remained.

Malfred was a lonely man, but an imaginative one.  All that was prologue.