Ergo, the Ogre

Preston is a troubled youth and extremely large for his age. The former is due, in part, to his lack of social skills and his parents’ peculiar philosophy on socialization. For instance, rather than letting him go outside and play with other giant children, they insisted that he stay indoors and watch videos of kids playing. Obtaining social skills via osmosis was the theory — the next best thing to being there.

If the truth be known; it was Preston’s mother Gay who is the over-protective worry wart. She frets over Preston being part Cyclops (obviously a throwback from his father’s side) and something happening to that one and only eye. The poor kid needs glasses (glass?) as it is, but no one can figure out how to make one that would stay on Preston’s large and bulbous head. Assuming of course, he would consider wearing it.

Eventually, Preston sneaked outside. There he found an amazing world he knew nothing about. None of it was anything like the socialization videos they made him watch. Across the street he saw a group of boys playing with two small cubes with different numbers of dots on all sides.

“Hmmmm.” Preston crossed the street and approached the boys.

“Can I play?”

The boys glanced at one another.

“I don’t know,” Samuel shrugged. “Can you?”

Perplexed and way over his head, Preston shrugged. “How do you do it?”

“You roll the dice and then –“

“What’s dice?” Preston interrupted.

This was too much for the boys. They all busted out laughing at Preston’s seemingly silly question.

Preston waited for them to stop laughing and answer him, but they just kept on laughing.

Then he got mad. Really mad. Mad is the wrong word. It was more like an explosion of rage.

Preston stomped off, hot tears burning his eye and running down his nose. He grabbed the biggest rock, more like a boulder actually, he could find and hauled it back to where the boys were playing. There, he raised it over his head and slammed it down as hard as he could, effectively squelching their laughter. Permanently.

Preston went home and stayed indoors for the rest of his life — a la Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird.