Tarpaulin Sky
Gregory Howard My Brother
My brother, who for years has suffered the suspicion that something mysterious and untoward happened to him in his youth, has decided to build a scale replica of our childhood home. In this place of familiarity and dread he intends to recapture those illusive events and in doing so, surmount them. This does not surprise me. He has always been prone to excessive gesture. My job is to verify and amend. He sends me photos and I look at them and together we reconstruct the house. For example, we look a photo of the living room. The room is fairly dark and comes across as musty on account of deep red and ornately decorated rug in the center of the room, the dark brown tables and chairs, and the fact that our mother always kept the drapes closed in order to protect the furniture from sun damage. He is kneeling on the floor, his face close to a book, while I am asleep on the couch. My body looks lifeless. He wants to remember those things not in the picture. Was there a small darkly polished table behind the couch? he asks. There was, I say. And did it at times, depending on the day of the week or the quality of light, resemble a small and frightened animal, he says. That’s debatable, I say.
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