I was always told that if one goes to college, I would have a proper career. When that endeavor failed, I was told to go knock on business doors, and was chased out with internet application forms. When that failed, I was told to code, and I’d be able to guarantee a job in tech. But then that failed, and I was alone, at home and looked down upon as though I were a leech. And when asked to assist me, I would be given looks of disgust, or excuses to not talk to their employers, as there was nothing but excuses.

And some wonder why I went the way of the bottle. It was my only friend, the one that would not judge me. My name is Karl, and growing up, I was the model student. Studious, well-behaved, and the one the teachers liked. My science teacher would always praise my presentations, and was always eager to comment on how I would win all my science fairs. I was honor roll all through high school, and many put their hopes in me. My parents were eager to push my pursuits, expectant to my success. But even that was not enough to be cut from the job I managed to claim after my college degree six months after I was hired by a rather impressive corporation.

I was soon tossed out because the boss and manager took a paycheck in order to employ someone from a foreign background. My mother was upset, and she tried, and failed to convince them to take me back. My father blamed me, and told me to pull myself up by the bootstraps, and as I attempted, I never received replies from places that were looking for positions to fill, and would not respond, even after three months of no one replying to the position to fill, with excuses such as “overqualified”. My sister started making snide remarks about me, her and her union job, and refusal to get me a position in her hospital, mocking me to my face. My brother would treat me like a disappointment, no matter the days turning into weeks and then months of searching. But alas, nothing but foreigners coming in.

The mockery continued at home, as I learned more skills in hope that I would be chosen for additional odd jobs, however even those would dry up. My father would repeat that I need to stop being lazy, and, according to his motto, to “pull myself up by the bootstraps”, I should man up and not remain idle. But when I asked for help, he lectured me that life doesn’t give hand-outs. As time passed, it was getting harder and harder to explain to prospective employers why there is a gap in employment, which continued in being declined for prospective jobs, as one woman explained that it seemed I was “unreliable” if I could not fill the gap in employment.

It was around this time that the girl I dated left me, as she was friends with my sister, who continued to degrade me, thinking that I would fight back, and have an opposite reaction, which would lead me down a cycle of depression, which led to Robin leaving me at the counsel of my sister, who thought it wise to say that she deserved better than me. It was then that I found a devil that would consume me for some time. It made me enjoy life with others, even for occasional evenings, leaving me regretful the next morning, much to the disgust of my mother. And thus is my life, an endless circle of the devil in the bottle, degrading treatment, judgmental comments and disappointed looks in the eyes of those that would be family.

The only one that would grant me pity was my paternal grandmother, Gertrude Bauer. She always commented about how she disapproved of my mother, and comments on how she should be more of an understanding mother, and how much of a disappointment my father is, nagging him as if he were a failure as a son. And upon hearing of what Olivia did, she disowned her, calling her a disgrace. She judged my father and commanded him to talk to some of his friends to help me out, which got the two to argue, one saying that I need to fight my own battles, and the other insisting that a parent should help his child.

“He’s lazy, and needs to pull himself up,” my father liked to tell her.

“And how did you get your job out there in the mines? Didn’t I make calls, and nag and go out there to talk to ‘zem?” She growled back, her German temper flaring so that he quailed in the end beneath the heat of her glare. “I pushed your father to go out and talk to them, which he did. Truth is you didn’t pull yourself by no straps, and didn’t win that job, it was given to you by him and I, and now zat your son needs the same help you’ll deny him? We raised you better than that, just as we raised your brothers better!”

In the end, it happened that she won because my father not long thereafter began making calls and might well have gotten me a job in the mines. My hopes were as I listened to him make calls days later was to score a mechanic’s job, since toiling on cars had long been one of my favorite hobbies. So I worked hard, got the drinking under control as promised to her, and also made an effort to clean up, shave and prepare to present myself before the heads of the mines.

Misfortune never very far from me, struck once again as old Nan who had just celebrated her ninety-third birthday died in her sleep. She’d done all she could to help me, and on the cusp of claiming a minor position in the mines’ I was informed not long after the funeral that my father’s endorsement was being pulled. “It’s just the way of the world, I pulled myself up and you have to son, no handouts!”

I have to admit that by this time I was neck-deep in self-pity after the death of the only friend I had, and filled with bitterness I lashed out. “Like what uncle Henry did right?”

It was a bitter thing to say, he had always envied my uncle who had moved away and who had always he claimed been his mother’s favorite after their youngest brother Karl died in a sudden car-accident between twenty and thirty years ago.

Accusing me of being drunk he was to refuse to drive me home, claiming me to be drunk and ungrateful, with the women piling into the car. It fell because of this upon Henry to drive me home, with the old man already retired and with a lame leg he had me accompany him to his car. “You shouldn’t goad your dad he’s a good sort, Karl just a little behind the times.”

“He’s an ass,” I grumbled yet with no real bite, I could never hold a grudge against my uncle, especially not when he had been much closer to my grandmother than anyone else.

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“Its startling how much you look like my father, same height and hair,” Henry said staring as I helped him into the truck, “A shame Carol and the girls couldn’t have come on account of her ill-health and Nancy being in labor.”

“Sure, let me just help you into the truck, and I’ll get your stuff uncle Henry,” I told him with a shrug doing just that. His truck was an old one, since he was too cheap to properly spend money on it, preferring to invest it all into his three daughters, Nancy, Shelley and Sarah. Only Sarah wasn’t married yet, and had a kid out of wedlock something that had mortified her family yet they had rallied around her.

Now it was Nancy’s turn, I thought more than a little envious of my cousin who was just two years older than I was. Twenty-six years old and she already had a kid, was all I could think about despondently comparing her fortunes with my own. She had of course married a cow-farmer who lived over in Texas while I had stayed on the East Coast.

It was now as I was helping load several boxes into the truck while uncle Henry watched me that he exclaimed, “Hold Karl! I just remembered, ma left you something in that there box you have there. Or I should say that it was da’s thing that she inherited from him, and he brought over from the old country.”

“What is it?”

“Some big old ring, it’s usually red but sometimes it’s black.” Henry said pointing in my direction from where he sat in the driver’s seat.

“Is it a ruby?” I asked placing it down so I can search through it.

He shrugged, “No idea.”

It didn’t much matter to him, but my curiosity proved too much so I dug through it and quickly found it and with a cry of, “Found it!” I dug it out and found the ring which had been inside an old shoe-box full of grandpa’s pictures and nan’s, from the old country.

The ring was gold and had on its top a stone just like he had described later when we were out on the road I couldn’t help but study it closer. “Where did gramps find it?”

“Dunno, he was some big-head researcher over in New York, before he moved down to Florida, and before that he- well he never spoke of where he worked over in Germany.”

It didn’t take a lot of brains to guess who it happened that he had researched for as an assistant at fifteen years old in Germany, before he came to America. It didn’t matter to me, what mattered at that moment was the ring, which continued to captivate.

It happened that as I twisted and turned it, to examine it closer it began to turn turquoise to my amazement. Pointing this out garnered little more than a raised eyebrow from my balding uncle, who focused then on the road.

“Look uncle it just changed colors!”

“Blue, huh that’s new,” Henry commented, “never saw it do that, even when Karl played with it all those years ago. But that’s old Quath for you.”

“Quath?”

“Yeah, da used to call it that, or spoke of something like that, apparently he got the ring from a friend in the old country, who gave it to him.”

“What happened to him?”

“He disappeared when climbing a mountain, some let me think,” now he stopped speaking only to shrug, “Sixty years ago, according to da he had done this thirty years before that then reappeared after a year, but finally completely disappeared thirty years after that first disappearance.”

“That’s weird.”

“I know, right? I don’t know why he, or da called that ring Quath but all I know is that is its name. Karl also called it that, just before-” He stopped speaking.

I knew what he wanted to say but couldn’t. The rest of the two hour drive passed quietly listening to his old 80s metal songs.

My father lived an hour from old nan, who had always preferred the countryside to the big-cities he liked better. Dropping me off in the suburbs, I had just stepped out when Henry rolled down the window to look me sternly in the eye, “Oh and Karl? Don’t show that ring around your dad. It was Karl’s and he might just take it and chuck it.”

“Gotcha.”

“Oh and… try not to be too hard on him, your dad’s been through a lot, and he did love your nan, okay?”

It was the sort of advice that might once have made me want to listen, however in recent days I had started getting used to just bobbing my head and mouthing off an ‘okay’. Convinced he had talked me into going easy on dad, I made my way in, suffered through a lecture on going out drinking with uncle Henry and on laziness and then made for bed. Later I was to note that the moon was almost full.

It happened that nothing changed.

Henry had the best of intentions, but even after three phone-calls my father remained convinced that the solution was to push me to ‘work harder’ and go back out there and job-hunt. The biggest blow came when I was turned down for a local burger-flipping job.

This was what finally drove my father when the time came to pick me up after a day of follow-ups on the online applications, to decide to stop in front of the local watering-hole. It was a large red building with a sign with a cowboy hat on it, on account of the owner Larry being a fat old Texan from Houston or some such place.

Confused I asked him, “What are we doing here dad?”

“Figured, you’re just going to stop here anyways to celebrate your failures or whatever the hell it is you do, so why not just speed up the process and save some time.” He grunted with a sneer, “Now get out of my car.”

I stared at him. I couldn’t believe my ears, and choking back several words I knew I might later regret I threw open the door and was out of his Mercedes. My feet had barely touched the pavement before he tore his way down the road yelling back as he did so, “Get someone else to drive you home! Think of this as time-out and a wakeup call you lazy-bum”

“Wait! Hold up! What about my phone?” I shouted only realizing then that I had forgotten it in the car.

His answer was to throw it out the window.

I raced over to pick it up, only to find that the screen was cracked and shattered, and the blasted thing wouldn’t turn on. Cursing after him, I tried to give chase yelling, “Wait! Wait up you fat old bastard!”

He didn’t listen or slow down for an instant.

Any other man might not go into that bar. I don’t recall a great deal after the fourth or fifth drink, I only know that Larry eventually called someone up. One minute I was complaining into my fourth bourbon and the next I was sitting in the front of a car. “It wasn’t my fault, they imported him, and…”

“I don’t care,” whoever it was who was driving me, his accent strong as he glared at me, “Three years of college and I gotta deal with driving some college kid home ‘cause the boss likes him.”

“Least you got ‘a job,” I slurred hardly able to think.

He lunged at me. What he was thinking, I don’t know I only know that as I drunkenly tried to fend him off the car swerved and in the next instant a transport’s horn blasted as its lights flashed at us.

One minute I was fighting against the accented guy, the next he jerked the car and I was flying through the windshield (he hadn’t secured my seatbelt). Screaming as the car was smashed and I flew through the air I saw a flash of red, as the red-moon shined down on us if for a few minutes.

It was then that red changed to darkness, as I was transported for the first time to Quath.