[For the folks who commented on my last post, scratching their heads and squinting their eyes with reasonable bewilderment, this is just me having a little bit of fun and taking some creative liberties with unused ethnographic fieldnotes. I’m running out of inspiration for this foray into fiction, so I probably won’t post too many more installments in this “Alphebet Houses” serial. Lucky for you all.]

All told, the first twelve years of Tyrone’s life, before that celestial visitation, were pretty standard as childhoods go, ignorable in their ordinariness. Little in Tyrone’s George Washington Elementary School days hinted at the faintest sliver of precocious exceptionalism. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about him. He wasn’t a loner or an outcast. He got along fine with most kids, well enough to swap Atari videogame cartridges and to get his name hollered up four flights of steps on Saturday mornings to even out sides for two-hand-touch football games.

Tyrone drew no special attention to himself one way or another. Nobody really bothered him, but they just as often didn’t bother with him, either.

When it came to schoolwork, Tyrone was hardly a nerd, though he never got left back or had his parents called for bad behavior. During Washington Elementary’s sixth-grade graduation ceremony, he received only one certificate, “for Good attendance, five or less days absent,” Principal Johnson had announced into the feedback-whistling microphone. And Tyrone didn’t even have to walk up to the stage like the Perfect Attendance recipients did. He just stood in front of his wooden auditorium chair, identical to all the other chairs there, connected to every other seat in his row, the back of Tyrone’s legs forcing the spring-wound seat, against every bit of its mechanical inclination, down into its horizontal (seatedly) position while he listened to all the other names announced along with his own, the auditorium blatantly disobeying Principal Johnson’s request to “please remain silent until the final name is called,” an appeal that had to be shouted over that youthful assembly’s rowdy clamor. Students whooped and howled for every single name — and in decibels roughly proportional to each student’s overall level of recognized extracurricular coolness. Tyrone’s name didn’t come close to drawing the loudest response of the morning, but it was cheered with at least as much fanfare as half the others. And was in a completely different acoustic universe from the hiss-pockmarked silence elicited minutes before by the three Perfect Attendees forced to take the stage.

Of course, Tyrone did get teased, but no more than the playground average. He was lucky enough to have been born without too many of the more obvious physical quirks that kids in the neighborhood usually latched onto with their taunts. He had no buckteeth. No bulging eyes or coke-bottle glasses. He was spared a hump, a conspicuous limp, or massive fits of uncontrollable face-twitching. His butt and head roughly fit his frame, not too bulbous or pathetically miniscule for the rest of his lanky body.

And if anything, that was Tyrone’s most lampooned feature; he was shoestring thin, which was just a touch slimmer than many of his classmates would have allowed had they been consulted on the matter. So he got pinned with the nickname TyBones on the very first day of Ms. Reskin’s second-grade class and never, ever lost it, not even after the meat around those bones began to fill itself in two years later. Still, TyBones was tame as those kinds of things went, especially where Tyrone lived, in the Alphebet Houses behind George Washington Elementary School, a place where name-calling often got black-eye ugly.

But then, when Tyrone turned 12, everything changed. He got a message from God behind a broken-down dumpster. First, there was a golden light, fairly standard, some say, when it comes to these kinds of occurrences. Then he heard a voice (which Reverend Samuel, many years later, would famously describe as “both deep and hollow at the exact same time”). That light and that voice seeped out from amongst the discarded beer bottles and candy wrappers and emptied milk cartons and losing lottery ticket stubs and every other assorted piece of mildewed or rusted detritus abandoned inside that large metal container, the one that had had its two back legs missing for as long as anybody could remember, leaning itself neolithically against the burnt-brick façade of the liquor store’s back wall.

(Image slightly altered from a photo by Flickr user venicephotog)