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A Boy’s World

(excerpt)

Sometimes I can’t remember what mom looks like. Sometimes all I can remember is her smile. Mom has only been dead a year and her face is already beginning to fade. I have to look at the pictures dad keeps on the mantle. They too are beginning to fade. There must be something wrong with me that I can’t remember mom. Maybe I didn’t love her enough.

It’s dawn. I am buried in my room, like it was a tomb. The morning light slips through the blinds and the invasion begins. The light is dull. The fan in my room chug-a-lugs along, stirring the heat slowly. I don’t care about the heat. The sound of the motor helps me sleep. It’s comforting. At night I don’t want to think about the rest of the world. Silence scares me. But the silence outside holds surprises. The unpredictable keeps me awake. Or maybe I’m just afraid of the dark.

I can hear my father downstairs. He’s been up for hours. I don’t think that he ever sleeps. My old man wanders around the house like a ghost. Mumbling to himself. Sitting on the porch staring at his roses in the darkness. Talking to the emptiness. Talking to mom. Living in his own world. Living in yesterday. Limbo. Broken. Drifting from one day to the next. In and out of the hours. Sometimes he looks happy. Happy in another time. When I didn’t exist. When there was just him and mom.

When I come home from school, the house is like a funeral home. Walk into the living room and find him sitting on the couch where I’d left him earlier that day. No television on. No music. Just sitting there. His only friend, a cane that leans against the couch. Sometimes he looks like he’s dead.