Upon waking up one day to realise that he had turned into a boy and after being shocked and feeling all the stereotypical responses that one could reasonably expect of a dragonfly who turned into a boy to feel, the boy hid in some secluded place of a park to familiarise himself with human ways.
He was naked and looked terribly different from the human beings he observed from afar. They wore clothes and were colourful like flowers and butterflies, which incidentally, he had been unable to catch as his fingers and hands were now too large and slow.
At night, he would rummage through the garbage bins to eat leftovers of what he saw people threw away. He liked the taste of most of what he ate. He liked using his tongue.
Naturally, the garbage food was sometimes contaminated with things that should not be consumed by little boys, and he would suffer from the occasional food poisoning that brought about bouts of diarrhoea. Actually, even on good days, there was a lot shit.
Of all things human, he was most disgusted at how he had now required to defecate and by how disgusting did the human beings shit! So much of it came out of his behind. As a dragonfly and until now, he had never noticed how humans shat as they did it in the hypocritical privacy of the toilet.
“I have so much shit, I'm like a dog.”
He wondered if he was a human or a human-dog hybrid.
The little boy not sure when would it be appropriate for him to go into the open to befriend other human beings. They spoke, but he couldn't. They wore clothes, but he didn't. He shat in parks, but they never seem to shit at all. He was ashamed of his bowel habits, and that inhibited him the most. The little boy had a hard life living in the park. Soon, his hesitations wore his cognitive abilities away, and he forgot what he had wanted out of life.
*
He was discovered by a nature lover who was hiking around the secluded areas. The police was called upon, and there was an organised search that captured the boy. It was featured in the newspaper as people were always curious when wild boys appear, and they would want to know if they swung on ficus roots, much to the thanks of Kipling. Since he did not, they concluded that he was abandoned by some pregnant teen or something common-sensical, never mind that there were no ficus trees in the park.
He was sent to the orphanage and the administration decided with a stroke of innovation that the day of his discovery was to be registered as his birthday. The year of birth was unknown. So they arbitrarily decided that he was five years old. They also arbitrarily decided to call him Albert. There was no other persons or pets called Albert in the orphanage at that point in time and it prevented unnecessary confusion.
Upon being better fed and nursed back to his natural strengths, the boy regained his original curiosity and learnt everything with eagerness and zest. He was bright and fast and did pretty well in school, and even came to read a comic book version of the story of Tarzan, as recommended by his teacher. (“My, my, Albert, are you saying you are like Tarzan? Ho ho ho!”) After which he decided not to tell anybody about how he came about as it would only hinder his development.
He grew up, worked part time, had pimples, and crushes, and friends that came and went. He worked hard and got into the humdrum of everyday life and celebrated Christmas and the Chinese New Year. Soon, he almost forgot that he was ever a dragonfly and his purpose, until he went to a park and saw a middle aged man walking a dog which passed shit onto the ground, and with little hesitation, the man picked up the shit with an inverted plastic bag.
Right, thought the boy, man is unwilling to shit in public, and has all that funky jazz about toilets and flushing after use, but is more than willing to pick up dog shit with much self-righteous pride.
As he watched the man toss the packet of dog shit into the garbage, he thought of the time, when he was a little boy living off garbage scraps, in a way that he had not thought in a long time. If there was another little boy living in the park right now, he would be so poor thing to find dog shit to eat. Then again, when he was primitive, he wouldn't think that eating shit was such a bad thing. Why did he find it so repulsive now?
His curiosity was rekindled, and he decided to go study a degree in psychology, hoping that the promised realms of pseudo-science and controlled experiments would shed some light on all the “myshitery”.
Upon the completion of his freshman year, he made a vacation trip to the seaside. He had never seen the sea before and he rewarded himself with a much deserved a break for earning the money and his place in the university. He wanted to do his honours thesis on the social psychology of shit.
As he was swimming, he thought of how the fish and all marine creatures shat into the sea and the irony that he was swimming in the biggest shit dump of all. Then, an ancient giant fish louse caught him and ate him up, and thus, ending the life of the boy who was obsessed with shit and who was once a very curious dragonfly.
Weeks later, the same newspaper picked up on his disappearance and featured a heart warming report on how the boy who had quite mysteriously appeared had mysteriously disappeared.
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