Let me tell you a story.

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, in the middle of nowhere, during winter, there was a little boy who couldn't sleep. He didn't have nightmares nor was he insomniac. No. He heard things. One day, his mother told him: “Charly, if you don't sleep tonight again, there will be no Christmas for you.” But for Charly, it was just impossible to sleep while those whispers were telling him stories. Stories about life, love, or fairy tales. He loved them. So he replied to her : “But mom, I can't ignore the fairies! I don't want to be cursed!”

His half-sister - Lauren - barged in the room while he said this. “Poor baby Charly, you wouldn't want your only friends to leave you alone, would you?” Her again. She could not help making fun of Charly. Secretly, he had given her a surname,“The Ogre”, because of her height and the multiple pimples she wore. She was the elder by only 3 years, and she already behaved as an adult and it bothered him.

The relationship between those two hadn't been always like this. Indeed, years before that, they would play in the garden, making snowmen and annoying their neighbor, shouting under his windows. But all of this ended when Lauren went to high school. When IT happened. She was pretty and cleaver - no one could have said otherwise - but when she went off from school with her new boyfriend, Cooper, she totally changed her behaviour towards Charly, ignoring him, making fun of him and bullying him.

And yet, she was right. Charly didn't have many friends. He used to have a few in primary school, but they all abandoned him after he had had a major crisis at school. Charly was neither choleric, nor ill. He was - as his mother used to say - “Special”. Charly didn't behave the same way boys of his age did. Indeed, Charly was a quiet, dreamy and nervous young boy - suffering from Asperger's Syndrome.

Before I go any further, I would like to tell you a little secret. I'm not the narrator you think I am. As a matter of fact, you know who I am because I'm telling you this story, but I am not human. I'm the Beagle of this story, Ashes. Yes I know, it can be disturbing, a dog telling a story! It's impossible! But I'm the one best suited to relate this one for you. This family welcomed me five years ago in order to be Charly's best friend. And I have to admit that in the beginning, I found him a little strange because of the multiple weird things he does: counting his socks four times in the morning, checking under his bed if the four containers are still ranked, or verifying if exactly seventy kibbles have been poured into my bowl. I have accustomed myself to all of these, it's normal for me. But what is normality anyway? Well, let's get back to the main topic.

Surprisingly, Charly didn't deny what The Ogre had said. He just ran out the house, fleeing his mother's shouts. And I followed him outside, to cheer up him. We walked in the neighbourhood for hours, losing the notion of time until well into the middle of the night. Charly didn't say a word. He kept walking among the mist, listening the story the wind was telling him. He looked up at the sky, searching for something, before lying down on the snow. At first, he seemed to shiver in his thin cotton shirt but as I progress toward his flank - in order to warm up him a bit - I noticed that actually, he wasn't freezing cold. No, he was crying, and it was the first time I witnessed this. He took me into his embrace and then said: “You know Ashes, The Ogre is right. I'm a freak. I don't have any friends other than you. People look at me as if I'm a sort of time bomb that can explode at any time. But I am human! I experience things just like the others! And the fairies told me that if I'm not happy here, I can join them into their world.” I didn't understand immediately what he was talking about. And we remained still for a moment.

At some point, he got up and, wiping off the tears which had frozen on his cheeks, moved onward to the porch of the nearest house. And as he was crossing the road, he stopped himself, staring at the sky. He carried on his path, when lights came from nowhere. I noticed that Charly was smiling. I heard screeches among the mist. Charly was laughing now. Did I miss a joke from him? I don't really know. And then Charly disappeared. I don't know where he went . I continued my way -thinking that he had join the porch - but as I approach it, I saw he had fled. My best friend had vanished. I looked for him in the whole town for hours, days, months maybe. I couldn't go home without Charly.