The remarkable light from his copper eyes gets scattered by all the ridiculous things about his bearing. He is a cherub stretched skinny across a 6’4” frame, though he never reaches that height because of the curve of his spine, stoop of his shoulders, and downward and outward protrusion of his bird-like neck. He is all thin elongated ovals, which saves him from being a simple stick figure, but just. Take a flattened disk of silly putty, transfer a comic strip image of Charlie Brown onto it, stretch to three times its original height, then bend ten degrees off the vertical. That’s Harold.
His oval face is flat, except for a Bob Hope nose. His head, out of which prominent ears jut like outriggers, is drizzled with hints of light brown hair. His mouth is almost always closed in a wan smile, the way mothers smile at sick children, which hides the fact that he only has four teeth—two canines above and their stalagmites below. When he talks, even without any exaggerated movements of his mouth, his missing teeth amplify the distance between his lips, making even the calmest declarations look like screams. His voice is deep and rich, but the words are round and unformed, tongueless.
When he smiles—really smiles—it is atomic, erupting closed-mouth from the bottom of his face so high and wide its corners almost touch his earlobes. His eyes shut in little versions of the same smile. A crippled Stan Laurel.
His toothpick arms and legs are neural strangers to one another, moving to separate syncopated drummers. The disconnection isn’t so noticeable when he just stands or walks slowly, though even then the percussion occasionally erupts into spasms. It is when he tries to run, which for him is just a very fast walk, that the cacophony reaches its most frightening Frankenstein extremes.
But then there are those eyes, light refracting through an unlikely alloy of contentment and wonder. Reminders that something triumphant lives in this broken body.
