Character Sketch #1

The kid was half his size, but was still winning. He was small and scrawny, but he was vicious. His mouth contorted into a grimace, he rained mindless blows on the other boy, his shoulders swinging with the effort of each thrust, his feet lurching forward slightly each time with the mometum.

The boy he was assaulting was barely visible beneath his raised arms, which he used to block the strikes against his hunched frame, receiving the strikes continuously. Yet, the boy was still unharmed, like a mountain unmarred by the buffeting of shrieking gusts. His only movement was the slight shuffling of his feet to keep the distance between him and the other boy. The thrashing limbs caused the boy's mop of brown hair to brush back and forth, obscuring his eyes so much that one wondered if he could even see the face of his attacker.

By now the whole class had noticed, and the kids ran from the basketball courts, the nearby kickball field, the cafeteria and the courtyard, like rats streaming to a meal from their hidden crannies, vicious in their taste and voracious in their appetite for blood. The kids cheered on Johnny, of course, he was their friend, Thor was so big and weird and quiet and had such a weird name, so of course no one wanted Thor to win.

But Thor was still taking the blows, seemingly unaffected in the least. Finally Johnny gave a last, extra-fast round of punches and gave up.

“Get out of here, you stupid butthole!” he yelled, and then strutted away, so proud to have taught that stupid Thor a lesson. The other kids started wandering back slowly to the hot blacktop basketball courts, to the dry, brown grasses of the kickball field, to the dim, smelly, cafeteria, and to the bright, red-bricked courtyard. The high red-brick walls of the school grew quiet, left without sound to reflect, as if the whole school felt the vast anticlimax.

Thor brushed the hair out of his eyes, rubbing his head with the displeasure of the sudden headache. He looked away, and once he ahd seen that all the other school boys were gone, he retreated to a silent corner of the playground, where the shade of the hig building concealed him where nonce could see and where none would venture.