To clear my head, I waited for my mother to fall asleep, and took our ass, Darrel the short tailed donkey, into town for a drink at Willy’s Pub. Each night, at the same time, my mother requested me to read to her a fairy tale, one that her father had written for her as a young girl. It was a short tale full of little lies, but like all stories of fiction, it had its truth.
On this night, weakly, just as the hero of the tale slayed a phantom that was suppressing the queen with its depressing powers, my mother looked to me with sleep in her eyes, and said smiling softly, “I miss your father”.
I too smiled. I put down the book on her nightstand and rested my hand on her forehead. It was cold, damp. It was wet with sweat. I noticed that she had closed her eyes, and subsequently squeezed out a single tear that ran down into her ear. I wiped it away gently with my thumb and kissed her forehead, whispering, half to myself, for I believed she had drifted to sleep, that I too missed my father. It was incredibly sad when he passed, but I felt it affected my mother the worst. She was never the same after he got sick. It was as if his death stole from her a bit of life that she was unable to regain through the years.
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I supposed that it was because of this that she got sick, for I was told by some of the towns folk that once one gives up on living, as it seemed my mother did in those days, they become vulnerable. Without hope, people open themselves up to miss fortune. But maybe that was nothing more than a wisetale, like my grandfather’s story of a depressing phantom and a queen. For me, I witnessed my father succumb to his illness. I watched ‘the life leave his eyes’, as the doctor so perfectly put it, and I was fine after a few months, suffering little more than bad dreams. So who can really know? I guessed people are all affected differently by such things. I guessed that it was my young age and youthful resilience that no illness befell me like my mother.
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After she had fallen asleep, I left. It was near nine at night, and the sky was clear but of crows and the wispy purplish clouds and a full moon. I stood outside of our home, lighting my pipe, staring up to the night sky, when I noticed a shooting star pass. I remembered my older brother had told me that when a star falls, it was a message sent by God, and that it meant there was magic to be had. I laughed at the memory, for then I was sure he was being playful and not truthful with his words. But deep inside of me I still hoped that this idea was more than a lie. I hoped, like a child, that the world was not as boring as adulthood might have one think.
I cleared my pipe, still staring up to the expanse, to the Milkyway, which in itself was a piece of magic, and I thought deeply of my childhood. As kids, my brothers and I would lay in the yard late at night and wonder upon the stars, talking of God and where He might be in our world today. It had been quite some time since He had sent His only son to remind us mortals that He was alive and well.
“They call it the heavens for a reason,” my eldest brother said on a night no different than this one, “I bet He’s just beyond our sight, like He’s hiding in the distance, behind the stars, watching with His perfect eyes.” And I always liked that idea of God watching down on me, looking after me like He cared.
My middle brother on the other hand was more bitter. “I bet,” he began, pulling up tufts of dead grass as he did, “that He is nothing more than words in a book written long ago…”
But as time went and we grew separate, like the Y of a young tree, the idea of God faded into the background, and I thought of Him less. I was not embittered like my middle brother, just distracted by the day-to-day of life, forgetting often that there may be more in this life other than caring for my mother, and chasing my dream. Yet, on the decrepit porch of my poor home, before leaving for the pub and clearing my pipe, I looked to the stars and hoped that He was just out of sight, and that it was only my deficient eyes which prevented Him and I from seeing each other, from me seeing the truth.
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