thieves and liars.

murderous insects.

hateful and hate stricken.

there could be beauty, instead only greed.

there could be love, instead only affectation.

most days are only darkness.

but the lights, the lights are like fireworks.

but they too fade and expire.

the burning outside becomes the burning inside.

and this energy, with all its glory, also expires, exhausted.

my cocoon, my chrysalis, my future beauty.

but i must survive this harsh environment.

i must survive these wicked winged insects and predators.

and is it just time? i can never believe in just time.

i can believe in what i see, what i experience.

and this world is full of experience.

full of things that prey, that mock, that study, that insult, that covet.

i grab the hand of the giant; but his hypocrisy rejects my gravity.

but sometimes, life is hell. sometimes life is nothing but suffering.

this world is my enemy.

i want to conquer it.

i will conquer it.

let these Gomorrahns defend themselves. let them come for me. let them comfort me.

So what? Am I a thrill seeker?

The world is my assassin. I must defend myself. So what?

***

This was how the artist started the spring. It was a period of awakening - but also one of the dying winter. The sweater he had worn most of the season was tattered and smoke holed. The rain inspired his sorrow. The brief periods of sunlight pulled him like a gravity, but could rarely rouse him from his bed.

A stack of notebooks assembled themselves like ramps and towers of Piza; like bridges for rodents; like Jinga, at any moment. Some filled, some half filled. Some had just a few doodles. One had been an outline for a play - in three acts. The title had been capriciously titled “How to fuck your mother”. It was a study of Freudism in modern society. The first act dealt with a young boy named Frank, and his maturity into puberty. One could easily see it as a summary of Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” set on stage - complete with liver and his father’s Fleshlight. The second act focused on Frank’s conception of his mother as a sexual object and his increasing desire and motivation to have sex with her. The second act culminates in his mother entering his room as he masturbates to a fantasy of her. Frank climaxes as his mother walks in, and the lights go out for intermission. The last act takes place later in Frank’s life as a young adult in his 20’s. He is visiting home for the holidays. There seems to be a tension and simultaneously an affection and excitement between them. With family and friends visiting for dinner as well, the main scenes center around the dinner and various tensions. Ultimately, the guests leave one by one, until Frank and his mother are left alone. As they finish their dessert, they leave the table - speechless - and walk toward the bedroom.

It was never really finished. He had completed the outline and the first act, but soon lost interest as it took so much time. Also, the artist was finding his characters difficult to relate to, and difficult to voice. He understood the underlying Freudian themes, but couldn’t express them in language that seemed fitting for Frank and his mother. Some time later, he did commit the general idea to canvas in a piece he called, somewhat cryptically, Motherhood and Apple Pie. (The latter part a reference to a mediocre comedic film which featured masturbation with an actual. literal, apple pie).

Many of the notebooks contained summaries or even just brief glimpses of ideas. The constant flow of ideas, which arrived seemingly from out of the ether, needed to be captured. It was an obsession, really. Any idea could be a great one; and every idea that didn’t get captured was a lost opportunity for artistic greatness. Ironically, he almost never went back to review the ideas. Most of his work occurred in the moment of the idea. If he wasn’t driven to execute immediately, it got documented in the notebooks. Every several years he tried to review them; but he almost never found the same emotion or inspiration to pick it up and work it.

Today, as he lay in bed, surrounded by his library - he found himself curious. He wanted to take an unusual moment to revisit some ideas. He wasn’t looking to revisit any particular idea today, but rather, just wanted to browse where he had been. He found that much of the ideas were dancing around his mental and emotional state at the time he captured them. He was - somewhat subconsciously - looking for something that reminded him of the Spring season; and there were several candidates:

*) A work titled “The Flirtations of Venus” would be visual and depict an androgynous “Venus” in the center, with various incarnations of other “Venuses” offering their attentions, affections, and sexuality. But these various Venuses would be held up by demons, as they couldn’t fly on their own.

*) A poem - “Untitled” - that would lament the demands of various lovers towards a complacent and apathetic “master lover”. The master lover would pick and choose without affectation or interest in order to fulfill his purely physical needs, while providing a heavenly experience for his subservient lovers.

*) A sculpture - “Untitled” - (humorously unofficially titled “ice ice baby”) which would be constructed of a heat/cold conducting metal. The interior would feature a cooling and heating element. The metal sculpture would be a baby, held up by a pair of hands. Next, the artist would create an opaque water substance, and sculpt a dense ice sculpture of a pregnant woman around the baby. When presented, the ice would melt to reveal the baby.

*) A speech - “Fulcrum for a fetus” - which would feature the artist on a milk crate with a megaphone reciting one-line summaries of abortions from mother’s whose lives were at risk.

*) A novella - “Flowers at dawn / Flowers in the field” - which would be a treatise on the tragedies of dying at the cusp of spring.

Each of these sparked a small emotional reaction as he considered his mindset at the moment he captured them. Yet, ultimately, they all fell flat in this moment.

***

BIG BANGS AND BEDROOMS

birds and bees

like fleas on a dog

like monkeys in a zoo

doing their thing

fucking in flight must be something

thoughts and desires

like mud on my shoes

like murder in the streets

infecting my mind

do plants suffer in the dark?

a cross on my breast, in orange and black

a one-time mis-spent afternoon

fooled by words

fooled by lust, lust for meaning

a memory in my heart, in blood and muscle

the everyday mis-spent nights

fooled by lust

fooled by love, love for a warm body, a warm mind

dirt and rainwater, in soil and my mind

like food in my soul

like a placenta in motion

pushing me through

is this how the gods did it?

mercury and moonbeams

like truth in a bottle

like escaping from Alcatraz

ontologies of yesteryear keeping me down

can this universe reflect on itself?

***

A mild depression is common for the artist as spring rolls in. As stems pop up from the ground, his mood compensates by grinding down. Some years, it’s more exaggerated - but this year, it’s relatively subtle. His friends don’t really notice; but what do they really notice, anyway?

It’s like seeing everything and everyone around you gaining energy from the ether. And you can see the energy flowing into them. And their uplift wears you down. And that little difference between them and you is like the little difference between heat and cold that physicists use to create air conditioning, or weather uses to create tornados.

So the artist has to move in and out of conversations, in and out of social events, in and out of his friendships. The April showers, don’t bring May flowers. They bring destruction and sadness. They bring days in bed; they bring the eaters of inspiration. While other artists experience the rebirth, the return of excitation after the dreary winter, this artist lapses. Into his bed, under the covers. Shielding from the sunlight.

All artists experience the shifting moods. For many, the down moods are where seeds are sewn, where the roots of deep emotions spin their roots into the fertile ground of the artist’s soul. A happy artist isn’t always a productive one; in fact, frequently the opposite. Some like to create the circumstances where such moods can exist and the artist can swim in the dark waters of emotional abandonment, of failed social interactions, of disappointment in the world, of pain too intense and complex to simply speak it.

Our artist is one who sees himself as something of a curator of these moods. Both in himself, and often with others. He likes to walk a small path around their life until he finds the small path that leads into their dark woods, and once there, he explores. It’s never malicious - he just wants to see what they see, feel what they feel, and put himself into their soul for some moments. He wants to consume their experience, ball it into a seed, and plant it within his own dark forest. His woods are a potpourri of human experience of every variety. Over here - a frail and small boy who was bullied by his parents and schoolmates for his effiminate character. Over there, a woman who tries hard, but has been beaten down over and over again to where she is at the edge of suicide. On the corner, a set of parents who are grieving over the loss of their child to a house fire. This one, a trans friend who can find lust and sex, but never love.

Most are based on real interactions, moments of conversations, evenings of enlightenment. Others, however, are merely imagined. Standing outside a building, smoking a cigarette, and watching the various clusters of people pass by. Sometimes there’s just a man across the street - maybe waiting, or maybe sitting on the curb. The artist imagines his story, and files it away in the forest. This old man, he was once a humble pipe fitter. He had spent his days as a union worker, making union wages, married to an irish women who never put up with his bullshit and personal issues, but allowed him his weekend evenings with his buddies to drink away his sorrows and disappointment at having not amounted to more. He had wanted to be something more in his youth - something like a radio or tv announcer. But, alas, his dreary looks were not for television, and his accent - a strange mix of Irish brogue and Cantonese - was not right for the air waves. His father was a third generation immigrant with Irish roots. His great great grandfather Taswell, called Taz, had come from the outskirts of Dublin to America to find a better life. The man’s father had a fondness for Asian brothels, and upon impregnating “Jade” (real name Biju), had vowed to marry her and raise the child. They named him Conner - though growing up most called him Connie. The irish lads took fine to the nickname, but others found the courage to degrade him as they saw it as a girl’s name - a nickname for Constance - itself viewed as a name for austere nuns. Growing up he spoke a variety of English that was highly influenced by the fading Irish brogue and colorful phrasing of his father. However, his mother’s broken English and Eastern world view also affected Connie as a boy. The idea of an Irishman marrying a Chinese whore was also seen as a complication both culturally in general, and for fitting in with society in general. The Irishman was not really accepted in the Irish community, and Chinatown wanted nothing to do with the mixed family of a whore. All of this left Connie without a strong footing in the world. His foot in each culture seemed unsteady, like standing on two slick rocks in a creek, about to fall into the water at any moment. And so, as he graduated school - he wanted to college, but there was no money for that. So he entered a trade school and became a pipe fitter’s apprentice, joined the union, and became a static cog in the machinery of building and maintence. He had once loved a woman, only to find she was already married. Their 6 month affair had inspired and fulfilled him in ways he never thought possible. But when he proposed and she confessed she was already married, he was more than crestfallen. He was done - with life, with love. He thought he would off himself, but was saved by a woman named Maggie. She found him outside the local pub, drunk as possible, trying to make a noose of his belt. But he was unstable, and trying to keep upright against the pub’s brick wall. She eventually brought him to her place, and nursed him over two days. She convinced him to return to work, and to forget about the hussie he had been in love with. After a week, he returned to her house with a small bouquet of flowers to thank her. She again took him in and made him a basic dinner of sausages and boiled potatoes. Over time, the two would see each other more often, until they mutually decided to get married. He was never as in love with her as he was with the “other woman”; but he had love for her, and she for him. She was a strong Irish woman who never allowed him to wallow in such self pity again. When he would deliver his sermons about self loathing and disappointment with his life and the world, she would kick him in the pants and remind him that the world owed him nothing and if he couldn’t be happy with what he had - including her - she could march him right back to that pub, get him stinking drunk, and make the bloody noose from his belt for him. She didn’t have time for such nonsense. He always relented. He was never sure if this was her way of loving him. He adored her strength and her tenderness toward him. Sitting on the curb, it had been 3 years since she passed from breast cancer. Those 3 years felt more like 30. He could remember her, but the feeling of her had been fading for so long that he couldn’t remember what it felt like to be near her. And at this age, at the tail of his pipe fitting career, with no money, a house covered in dust and ruin, he could not find the courage to think there was any future. Each day he thought about the pub, the drink, the noose. The one idea, the one memory, that persisted was her lack of pity, her heavy hand, her committment to construct the noose for him. It felt like betrayal to consider doing this himself at this point. He coudl go to the pub, he could get drunk, but he couldn’t go further because she owned those steps. So rather than ending his life, he suffered it - without her - without an exit. And now, here he was - on the curb. Waiting for a bus to take him to a pipe fitting job in some forgotten corner of the city. It was all he had - focus on the job. It was all that defined him. Well, that - and his weekends at the pub with his buddies. But they too were fading and failing. The group that had been as many as six, was now just three. And Connie was simply waiting his turn until there would be two.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

All of this happens within just a few minutes of the artist’s mind. He files it away in the forest because he believes there are several moments that might be candidates for his work. He thinks the idea of this broken down, but not broken man has something endearing about it. And he wants to explore that later. He finishes his cigarette, and walks east away from “Connie”. Connie - put aside to a pocket, but not forgotten. Filed away - he may write about him in his notebook later. Or maybe Connie will stay buried in the forest for years before the artist makes his way down that path again.

***

While the artist feels a repulsion for the Spring, he doesn’t see the perspective where he is, himself, like the Spring. These seeds he plants - though year round, occur most frequently in the Spring. He doesn’t act on them, of course. They are not ripe for plucking into everyday expression. Rather, they are the seeds, the nuts, the fruits which he buries in his forest, in his dark wood. There is no instantaneous rebirth of these into plump inspiration. No. They are almost more like a beer or wine, fermenting in the land of this wood. He doesn’t tend them. He doesn’t water them. He lets them simmer, he lets them marinate, he lets them unfold as they might. He lets them infect, and become infected. Until sometime, maybe a day, maybe 5 years. He wanders down that path of his forest, and stumbles upon a plant or tree he doesn’t recognize. And as he digs it up, examines it, breaks it down. As he inspects its trunk, its root. As he touches the stalk with his hands, and rubs the leaves on his face - then, maybe, the inspiration comes. And the artist, becomes the pipe fitter. He becomes the instrument of interconnection, of integration. And suddenly - “The Connie Vision” emerges in his mind.

***

Visions are often vague and abstract. They are artifacts of your mind, after all. And your mind can make sense of anything, truly. Have you ever dreamt of flying? Of talking animals? Of people who are one person, then suddenly and simultaneously another person? These are not things you normally encounter, and so they might seem strange in normal consciousness. But in a dream, they don’t seem strange at all. They are just concepts, and you process them like any other concept. Rarely do they seem strange enough to question them. Occasionally, you might recognize their peculiarity, and even enter a lucid state - where you recognize the dream, and can even direct it.

This is not different from the artist’s concept. They are regularly like dreams. There is a concept, but it’s not one you can necessarily understand in waking life. You might have to open your dream mind to appreciate them. Some people walk around day to day in a dream mind state. They are brilliant, but usually cannot function in normal society. Often, they can’t distinguish between the dream state and reality. Hell, often, they believe that the dream state is more real than reality. And they go off proselytizing their beliefs, their certainties.

But what is certain in this world? Is anything for sure? Bets you thought you won. Decisions you are sure you made. Things that happened yesterday, that today seem “different”.

So, Connie. In his yellow shirt, covered in stains. Or was it green? Blue? Who the fuck knows. Or even cares. He was a person. A human. He was a picture of something. Surrounded by the world. A world of imposters, of pretenders, of fake it til you make it, of who the fuck is this guy, and why is he leaning over my shoulder at the bar. Like his phone call is so important.

His vision of Connie was different from his observation of Connie. The observation represented some kind of reality. A snapshot, a quick picture of a point in time. This person, on his corner, living his own life. And so many questions.

Did he know love?

Did he know beauty?

Did he know compassion?

Did he know suffering?

Did he know abuse?

This vision was replete with so many questions. Some which inspired, others which informed.

But it was all the artist could see in his mind. This person. This Connie.

He could only see the internal struggle. The history. The hopeful future.

But this Connie. This person. This man. Who was he?

There were always multiple answers to this question.

He was who he was. He was who he wanted to be. He was his own potential future self.

Connie was his own mirror; his personal ouroboros.

There were times when the artist revered Connie. His freedom. He wasn’t tied down, so he could be anyone. He could shift in the moonlight and become someone else.

And there were times when Connie repulsed him. This lackluster nobody.

People are so fragile.

Their internals. Their externals.

The artist was so interested in what drove these different personas.

The gay and trans wanted to appear straight.

The blacks wanted to appear white.

The whites wanted to appear successful.

Sometimes, it worked. The community accepted them as the imposters they portrayed.

And sometimes, the community was skeptical, cynical. Who are these freaks? What are they doing in my neighborhood? At my places?

That week, the artist visited several establishments.

Each one, an eclectic bar with the “usual” options. Shitty beer. Shitty whiskey. But he didn’t care. Good, bad, or otherwise - alcohol was always the thing that brought him down to Earth. You couldn’t be high when you were drunk, only grounded. Sometimes on the dirt, sometimes on the pavement. Sometimes, with boots in the mud, in the muck. And sometimes, you could escape into the high as you left.

The artist, ever the scientist - loved to experiment with the patrons. This day, he would engage them in conversation. The next, he would buy them a drink, or food - anonymously - and watch their response. The concept of another human, randomly endearing them - without knowledge or familiarity - always surprised the patrons. The artist, however, felt it somewhat like an investment. His theory was that if every human invested in another human, the world would experience a change. A different phase of humanity.

So, Connie. Where did Connie fit in this tapestry of humanity that the artist observed. In many ways, he was the center. The core of averaged humanity. The essential components of what it means to be human, compressed into a single body. There were always accessories, hangers on. Beings whose existence supported or distorted another. They were just as important, just not to this artist’s focus.

The exceptional had always caught his eye, but it was the everyday, the mundane that made the structure of his world. The firmament of his idea of the world. Firmament being a clear misnomer. There was nothing firm in this world. Nothing static. The world was always changing. The people. The Earth. Himself.

So, Connie. The vision. The expression. The artist was like a machine, a synthesizer. It took an input, and applied its algorithms. And it created some output. And Connie was a rich and detailed input. Both the real Connie, and the artist’s perception of Connie.

The output was always the catalyst for the artist. Sometimes it was a poem, or a sculpture, a painting, or a song. It all depended on the synthesis.

In this case, what was “Connie”? Essentially a visual snapshot of a man, and the artist’s own runaway imagination. Mostly, the later. How to properly convey Connie to others?

He pondered this for days. Keeping it to himself. Until...

He said something about it to Flo one night. He hadn’t meant to let it slip... but as the words came out of his mouth, in his head he was thinking: ”What the fuck did I just do?”

He thought he might get away with it, because sometimes he mumbles, and sometimes Flo isn’t listening. But not this time.

“So what’s this Connie thing?”, Flo asked.

The artist looked at her dead in the eye. He might deny it... tell her she heard him wrong. But then he softened his look a bit, raised his eyebrows and smiled a touch, as if to say “You have unlocked the door, and now you may enter.”

“Yeah... about that. I didn’t mean ... “

“So it’s a new work?”

“Kinda. I mean, yeah - probably. But I don’t quite know yet.”

“What’s the prob?”

“Usually.... I mean, I know how I want to manifest my work ... but with Connie... it’s just ... not happening.”

There was a quiet moment between the two of them. In that space, he could hear the voice in his head again. It distracted him enough that he could make out it saying something like “Connie, the human. The destroyer. The destroyed.”

“So, Connie is this guy, or man who ...”

The artist was startled away from the voice, and began to tell the fable of Connie the American. (Connie the destroyed?)

As he finished, Flo was just looking at him strangely. She wasn’t sure if he was done, or if there was more to the story. The artist lowered his eyes and looked away. He appeared to be lost in a thought.

And he was. It hadn’t materialized just yet. It was like a cloud floating around in his head, and he needed to catch it somehow. His fingers repeatedly passing through the ethereal possession. He was still hearing an echo of the voice.

But then he grabbed it. The idea. A solution.

He looked back up at Flo, “Hmm.... I think I know what I need to do with Connie now”.

And there it was, and already proven. And that is how “The Connie Vision” became “The Fable of Constance Irishman“.

***

Those who knew him had little idea where the artist came from, or much about his childhood. This had been somewhat by design, as the artist didn’t really like talking about it.

He had grown up on the far outskirts of the city, in a small lower middle-class “neighborhood”. There were only about a hundred homes in Parsley Fields, a terrible name. The kids always had much catchier, alternate names: ”Fartly Fields”, “Parsely Pills”, “Fairy Fields”, and so on.

He grew up as a younger brother, three years the inferior. His older brother had a learning disability, and didn’t always make sense when they talked.

The artist’s father was the main parent during his youth. He has faint memories of his mother, but there aren’t many of them. Sometime when the artist was around four years old, his mother had separated from his father. She moved out to live with her mother, about an hour away. A month after moving out, his mother and grandmother were driving home one night, when a semi-truck ran them off the road. They were both killed in the crash. He never really understood what happened; but he did know the emotion it created in him, and never really knew how to deal with it.

His father was destroyed by it. There was a tacit assumption that the separation was temporary, and she would be home again soon. Although his father hadn’t been much of a drinker before, he found a new reason to swim deeper and deeper into liquor, vodka being his mistress of choice. A small dose to start the day, and more later to help him sleep.

The artist’s brother took it hardest of all. He was old enough to understand, but his learning issues prevented him from fully processing it. He knew his mother had died, but still asked when she was coming home - every day.

***

The artist’s brother became a burden as he got older. The artist’s father, in his usual drunken state could not provide proper supervision for his eldest son. The artist was still in school, and doing his best to keep his ideas and emotions to himself.

This all happened when the artist was seventeen and his brother was twenty. His brother usually watched television all day. He liked soap operas. He didn’t really follow the stories, however, the recurring characters made him feel comfortable. The artist was sure his brother knew the characters weren’t real, but still - it certainly seemed like he thought of them as real people who were living out the drama with him. Sometimes at dinner or later, his brother would try to tell them about what happened in the day’s episode; unfortunately, it was always convoluted, and the artist could never understand what had transpired.

Down the street, there was another family who had three daughters, ages fourteen, sixteen, and nineteen. The artist and his brother knew them well enough. The youngest daughter had some kind of learning disability also, though the other two weren’t particularly geniuses. Because of her learning disability, the youngest was home schooled by her mother. They would have morning classes, a mid-day lunch break, and then afternoon classes.

When the weather was nice, they would have class outside. The young daughter was particularly fond of those days. She loved being outside, the trees and flowers. But, like any family, there were days when her mother wasn’t unavailable. In late fall, her mother had come down with influenza, and had to take several days off from her daughter’s education.

On days like this, her daughter would usually just watch television or otherwise occupy herself. This particular week in late fall was warmer than usual, and her daughter wanted to go outside. There were trees, mostly devoid of their leaves, and no flowers to be found. A small wooded area behind the houses had many trees and a few dirt paths. She had decided to walk through the woods to find some kind of flower. It was her quest for the day.

That same week was a particularly sexy and steamy one for the soap opera the artist’s brother liked. In a particular episode this same day, a handsome doctor had come home and grabbed his girlfriend (well, really - his best friend’s wife - you know how soap opera’s are). He took her shoulders, pushed her against the wall, and started kissing her. She feigned resistance for a moment, then gave in. Next they were disrobing and into the bed.

The artist’s brother didn’t really know anything about sex, other than what he had seen on these soap operas. From the window in the tv room, his brother could see the neighbor girl walking down the street toward the path that led to the woods. The television scene had aroused him, and the sight of his neighbor created something energetic within him. He turned off the television, and watched her make her way to the path.

After putting on his shoes, he walked out the door and headed toward the path as well. It didn’t take long for him to catch up with her. Due to their shared disability, their conversations seemed innocent and demure. He began to tell her about the events from today’s soap opera episode. She just laughed at him. She had no real idea what he was talking about.

A moment later, he asked her if she wanted to see his penis. She didn’t know how to respond, but he pulled it out before she said anything. She had never seen one before. He was just laughing, although within seconds, it had become very erect. He walked toward her, and grabbed her shoulders. He pushed her toward a tree and put his mouth to hers forcefully.

She wasn’t sure what to do. The feeling was a strange combination of intense arousal and intense fear. She couldn’t scream because his mouth was over hers. He began grasping at her clothes to expose her breasts. Then they were on the ground, her below him. His pants were down to his ankles. Her breasts were exposed, with her shirt and bra lifted above them. As he laid on top of her, and could feel her belly and breasts against his own torso, he ejaculated - partly on her pants and partly on her stomach. A wave of euphoria washed over him. She, however, was disgusted.

He got up, and left her there as he walked back home.

The next day, the police showed up at the artist’s house. His brother was arrested for rape and taken to jail. A few weeks later, he pled guilty on advice from his public attorney. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

In prison, his brother didn’t last long. Everyone knows that prisoners aren’t fond of rapists and pedophiles. With his learning disability, his brother only barely understood what had happened. But since the experience had been so emotionally and physically significant, he relived it frequently. He would lie in his bed at night, and masturbate while talking himself through the event, letting everyone know what had happened. After a week of this, his cell mate shanked him in the shower. A small sharp edge had been created from a piece of rigid plastic. As the prisoners were in the shower, they all left except for the artist’s brother and his cell mate. His brother was paying no attention to the fact that everyone had gone. The cell mate walked up behind him and used the shank to stab his sides, and his neck. There was a loud shriek with the first blows. Then his cell mate punched him on the side of his head, and he fell down onto the tile floor, water and blood exiting to the drain.

Because no one saw anything, no charges could be brought.

The artist was incredibly sad from the entire experience. It was another human cut from his life, and in the worst way possible. But it was the artist’s dad who really suffered. He had come back slightly from his alcoholic days, now down to one bottle of vodka per week (along with various beers as well, of course). This event destroyed him, again. He only sat in his bedroom, and cried. His vodka consumption quickly ramped back up.

A week after the stabbing, they had a funeral. It was the last time the artist laid eyes on his elder brother. He felt overwhelmed with sadness, disappointment, depression. He knew his brother had never meant to hurt anyone, but this wasn’t something that was explainable or understandable if you didn’t know him. After the funeral, the artist had to drive his father home, as he was already one bottle of vodka in before the afternoon.

At home, his dad passed out in his room.

The next day was a Saturday. Per his usual habits, the artist had slept in late. His dad, usually an early riser, even when hungover wasn’t up yet. He figured maybe his dad had consumed enough extra alcohol to keep him in bed later than normal. As the afternoon plowed into the early evening, the artist was getting ready to leave the house. He needed to clear his head. He knocked on his dad’s bedroom door, but there was no answer. He called out to his dad a few times. He knocked again. Then he opened the door.

On the bed, his dad was in mostly undress, in just his underwear. He was halfway on his back, laying diagonally across the bed. On the nightstand was a nearly empty bottle of cheap vodka.

The smell had hit him immediately when he opened the door. It was the smell of the vomit next to his dad’s head, with some of it still spilling out of his mouth. The artist was confused at the sight. He grabbed one of his dad’s ankles, and shook it. He tried calling to him. But he could tell from the feel of his dad’s skin, and the temperature, that it was too late.

The artist collapsed onto the floor, his legs spread out, and his head fallen into his hands. It wasn’t that he didn’t know these things happen, and happen like this. He had just been in denial. Or, no - that wasn’t it. This had just been how things had always been. It was the artist’s normal. He just never understood that this was how his normal could turn out.

The artist stopped going to school after this. He received money from his dad’s insurance, which helped pay for his day-to-day needs. A lawyer helped him sell the house and all of the things in it. His mother had been an only child, but his dad had a brother. The artist’s uncle lived on the other side of the country, however. He had escaped the ill fortunes of the family. The artist thought he might go live near him, but later decided that he would just get an apartment and a job. He stayed in the house until he turned eighteen, then moved to the city.