Time for my monthly update

This is part of a story that I am currently working on. It is a christmas story and right now it is the one project that has my attention most fully. I like the idea of a child protagonist who acts much older than he is. I see this as a convention used all too often in stories today and i want to play with this idea by over exaggerating the effect. Hopefully it will come off as humorous as i imagine it will.

Cheers,
Price

A Christmas Story

Holland was a lonely boy. He lived in a lonely town, on a lonely street, in an immensely large, quiet, and very lonely house. You see Holland was an only child. He was also the only child in his neighborhood, and what felt like the only child in his town. It’s not that there were no other kids in Hidden Oaks, there were plenty; they just didn’t live in the same part of town as Holland, and odds are that if given the choice they would not move-in next door. The reason Holland was the only kid on his block was because he lived in the Hidden Oaks Retirement Community. Hidden Oaks Retirement Community was not your average run of the mill community. Instead of an unimposing rod-iron gated entrance, it had a twelve foot high security fence that was monitored by motion sensor cameras, trained attack dogs, and armed guards. There was only one way in or out of the community, and that was through a single archway barely big enough to fit one car at a time. The arch was manned night and day by a guard whose one duty was to make sure that “non-residents” did not get in. While most elderly people enjoy the occasional unannounced visit from their children or grandchildren, the residents of Hidden Oaks expressly forbade it. They detested anything childish, anything fun, and most importantly anything family. It was like a special preserve built specifically for the bitter, angry, cranky, and dejected, and Holland lived there.

It was not by volition that Holland had chosen to spend his formative years in Hidden Oaks Retirement Community; given the choice, Holland could easily think of a million places he would rather live, the least of which would have been a hundred times better than his current place of residence. Holland had been sent to live in the retirement community after the death of his parents. Holland had been two at the time, and though he had fragmented memories of his parents, the byproduct of a picture he kept hidden under his mattress, he had never lived the life of a child. At school, Holland was not the most popular; in fact, it was quite the opposite. At recess, while all the other children were playing games of kick ball, freeze tag, tether ball, and four-square, Holland would sit inside to play chess with the teacher and read the newspaper. When the teacher asked, one day, why Holland chose not to go outside and play with the rest of the class, Holland simply replied, “I have allergies,” and the next day Holland came to school with a doctor’s note excusing him from any recreational activities due to his allergy to “the outdoors.”

While Holland did have allergies, they were not the real reason Holland did not play with all the other kids at recess; he would have loved nothing more than to run around the school yard chasing the other kids in a game of freeze tag, or shoot hoops with the athletic kids, the fact was that Holland did not know how to play with the other kids. He had tried once when he was in the first grade, but because he grew-up around people who thought of imagination as a four letter word, Holland had never really used his. He had a hard time pretending that a stick was a sword, or that with his hands clenched in a partial fist, the fore-finger and thumb extended in the shape of an L, his fingers could resemble six-shooters. So he quit trying.