FOR THE MAN WHO HAS EVERYTHING

To describe one’s past presents a challenge not many care to live through, and even fewer share. It poses the same difficulties of a blind man describing his azure dreams - knowing full well that when he wakes, there will be only darkness and pain and regret. I too understand this sorrow. I feel it each time I speak of bygone years.

No one shall miss me, when the grave takes me into its carrion embrace. What few people I cherish have already made their way to a different world. I wish I could say a better world.

Ah, but I forget my manners. Forgive me if I dwell excessively on the sorrows of my age. I am old – and as has always been the case, it is the old who bury the future in warnings, seeking desperately to hold back time, to make it safe. The years alone in this cabin have addled my hospitality. Each second that draws by, I sink further into the refuge of my past, struggling to reclaim meaning from those faded images…

Look to your right, if you please. If you peer hard enough into the fire, you might still catch the tiniest glimpse of burning paper. A letter. And as it peels away from the heat, so too does my last link with this earth burn with it. Death comes for me now. My life can be measured in the span of hours.

Even so, the past clings to me. There is a need in me to speak of it, to release it, just once before I lose myself forever. But where to begin? I hear a low, familiar chuckle from somewhere in the back of my mind. Where else but the beginning?

I awoke in a tangle of sheets to find the room empty, the touch of breeze against my sweat making me shiver. Curtains billowed softly over a picture-frame landscape of green and gold fields. Mother had forgotten to shut the window… after… after the story. But no, that wasn’t right, was it? There would be no more stories… The wind whispered softly in my ear. The rush of blood tattooed a beat against my temples.

I heard voices murmur above the cicada hum, drifting in, lazily, from under the cracks of my door. I don’t remember moving from the bed, only the soft pad of my bare feet slapping across the floor. Past the sanctum of my room.

Several weeks earlier, the smell of wood intoxicatingly fresh, my brother and I raced across the old farm, enacting countless pursuits and deaths. Inevitably, as the younger child, I would fall to the hard earth clutching my chest – only to rise and resume the chase once more. My father - a man defeated before his time - smiled sadly as he watched us play. He knew the finality of death.

Inured to his pain, my brother and I would continue our merciless frolicking, pushing the farmstead to its limits. Through the course of our adventures, we discovered a small alcove hidden far above the kitchen. It became our asylum after… the accident. More so, I think, for my brother than myself. At the tender age of nine, he had already embraced the first vestiges of adulthood, something I was only too happy to postpone for a later date.

On this dark night, I found myself making for that same refuge of shadows. My brother looked only half-surprised as I slid into the tiny crevice beside him, peering dimly over the edge. The sharp staccato of voices hammered away inside me. I knew, even in the protective cocoon of my innocence, that what I was about to see would change my entire life to come.

I recognized my uncle Jim standing resolutely over another man. This second personage sitting in a chair, hands pressed to his face in – sorrow? Terror? From below, I heard only broken shards of the conversation: ‘can’t make…ecision…mistake…wha…about boys? You…can’t bring…er back…think… the cost…too much...’

I’ll never forget what happened next. Whether a trick of my fanciful memory or simply precognition fueled by a little boy’s fear, I knew before the second man even lifted his head exactly who my uncle Jim was confronting. My father.

I turned flat on my belly to look at my brother, his eyes and cheeks half-shrouded by the stale dark air. Still heavy with sleep, it almost seemed to me as if his face was glittering in the shadows – just like the bewitched children in mother’s faerie stories. Faintly alarmed, I brushed my hand against his shoulder.

‘Cory!’ I hissed as loud as I dared. ‘What’s happening?’

With his eyes still rooted to the scene playing out below, my brother answered. ‘Uncle Jim thinks that we should stay with him for a while. Until dad can… can get to grips with everything.’

‘So what’s the matter?’

‘It’s not that simple.’ My brother took a deep breath. ‘For one thing, the requiem cost a lot. We’ll probably have to sell the farm. But it meant so much to dad… to say goodbye properly…' Another slight pause. ‘You better get back to sleep now.’

I knew better to argue with him when he got into one of these moods. Somehow I managed to crawl out from under the niche and silently make my way back again, the lull of voices losing strength behind me. Only until I had once again embraced the comfortable skein of sheets did I realize what the glitter on my brother’s cheek represent. And my last thought, before sleep took me once again, was to wonder why on earth he would be crying…

In these tumultuous days, I shut myself away from the worries of this world. Alone, haunted by the memory of the dearly departed, I watch the fireplace consume itself amidst a blurry of snow and wind. I am reminded of a story, once told to me on the threshold of another age – my mother’s voice, still rich and honey-dewed, describing the great golden wings of the phoenix as it rises from the dead. My brother and I, enraptured, listening behind the half-folds of our eyes to the sweet promise of eternity. But my father – a faint glimmer of shadow against the open doorway – would merely close his eyes, bitterly. He knew the finality of death and allowed us this fantasy, for just one night amongst the glittering many of our lives. This is his story, and the story of my brother.

My name is Ash.