Primordial: An Abstraction

10

Instead of a dream, I experience a memory.

My only memory. The sole backstory of my character and identity. Everything else may or may not be a fiction.

The memory doesn’t have anything to do with me. And yet everything hinges on it.

It goes like this:

A velour curtain of night slams into the grass.

My stepfather ambles onto the patio and stares into the middle distance. The weight of his jaw seems to tug on the bags of his eyes, drawing them into a grotesque pretense of mourning and absolution.

The stars come out. The sky is a scintillating dome.

There’s a party inside the house. A family gathering. Maybe something else. Maybe nothing at all.

Somebody joins my stepfather on the patio. A young man with long teeth.

Smiling a tall smile, he glances back and forth between the middle distance and the sky and the aged man’s face. My stepfather might know him.

“Beautiful night out,” says the young man.

My stepfather grumbles something.

The young man looks at him hard and squints at the horizon. “What’s out there?”

My stepfather grumbles something.

The tall smile wavers at the edges. The young man says, “Is something out there? Are we going to be ok? Why are you looking out there?”

There was a silence.

Then my stepfather says, “Because I fuckin’ wanna look out there! Fuckhead!”

They continue to stare into the middle distance.

Soon my stepfather is alone again.

He stays that way until sunlight robs the distance of its precious interior.