alien_snipe

“Excuse me? Doctor?”

He didn't recognize the woman when she came up to him. But she smiled at him, and the lines in her face wrote a tale he couldn't read right away.

She set the child in her arms down on his feet. A small boy, with a mop of curly dark brown hair, looking up at him with wide, astonished eyes. “Show him, Luke,” she said gently.

The boy stepped forward hesitantly, and Insano knelt down to get more on his level. “Hello there, lad!” He blinked in surprise when the boy offered him a piece of thick, off-white paper with both hands. “Oh, what's this?”

It was a picture, drawn in crayon. Insano could make out a building with wobbly lines of windows. It was being lashed by violent tongues of red-orange and canary yellow, and thick, ugly scribbles of black smoke.

But there were two little people moving away from the fire. Smiling. One was a little boy, with a scrawled thatch of brown hair. The other, looping arms longer than he was tall around the child, had a long white coat, and huge glasses with spirals.

The letters were spelled out painstakingly below the picture, in carefully printed purple block letters. THANK YOU DOKOR ISANO

He had trouble talking for a bit. “Is this … for me?” The boy nodded. “Why … thank you very much, Luke. I am quite honored.”

The picture went on the wall of his study. He began to save his news clippings. One morning he entered to find Spoony looking over the scrapbook he was building, puzzled. “You're saving these? I thought you hated this 'Doctor Insano' stuff.”

He smiled. “I'm getting accustomed to it.”