Spittoon 2.1
( A Moment of Being ) Petur H. K.
On the day my grandfather died, I became my father‟s soul for a moment. I remember it like a child remembers next year‟s Christmas gifts, or like I remember love before it was a thing, or like I remember sand between my toes when I‟m standing on the bed. I remember it through a pane of glass, framed by the frontdoor. The memory is stuck, immutable. It is a picture, a mirage of a mirage stitched into my brain, a tableau of nothing but periphery. But alive, and in colour. Mostly green and brown. Coffeebeanbrown. * * * I was outside, playing on the huge rock in the backyard. I was a kid; I was a king. My father called at me from the door, the backdoor which was the front door, the only door, interrupted me on my mountain. He made me lose my imaginary crown. It went tumbling down the slope, landed in the tall, green grass. Sunk in the green. Back then we only had a manual mower. It was a monster. Fiery orange. A steel broom with a dragon‟s face and a crusher‟s teeth. Dad hated it. Mom never got near it. I both feared and admired it. But Dad always fought with it anyhow, wrestled it into every corner and every nook of our backyard — back when he was still Superman. He hadn‟t this summer, though. The crown was gone. I pretended to watch it, theatrically, from the apex of my domain, somehow peering through the green quagmire. Then I jumped off and darted inside, racing against myself. A still river of pebbles and moss ran between our backyard and the stairs up to our house. Den Grå Gletsjer. The Grey Glacier. I often tried to leap across it and onto the platform of the stairs in one leap. Over the years, those short years which feel more like a dream than dreams do, it had cost my mom and dad a lot of money in band-aids and hospital-trips.
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