Ship in a Bottle

Ship in a Bottle

A Story by vukcic

Ship in a Bottle
    There was a knock at my door, it was my brother Archie. He knew not to interrupt me in my study. I’ve warned him three times this past weekend that if he bothered me, I’d never be able to complete my thoughts. My conscious mind was so fragile, like glass borne of the sands of an hourglass, the slightest jostling corrupting its rhythm. My study was my sanctuary from the world of the mundane, of debauchery and psychology, of choosing locations for social events. Did I bother him while he read his magazines, his periodicals recounting evenings with carburetors and centerfolds? Of course not. I had better things to do.
    “Goddamn it, Charlie, unlock the door.”
    I stood. That simple lock befitted to me many luxuries. If the door were open he’d already be hovering over my shoulder like a vulture, sharpening his talons, waiting for my concentration to die so he could pick away at the bones. No, the door was locked. In my inner sanctum, I was lord and master.
    I listened as Archie continued beating at the door with his meaty fists. The sturdiness of his stature kept him above me since we were young. “Yes?” I asked.
    “Open the door, I’m not going to have a conversation with wood between us,” Archie said, the irritation in his voice seeping through the solid oak like carbon monoxide. I flipped the lock, wishing the door had a chain too, so he wouldn’t just walk in. I should get a chain. I should write that down.
    The instant he heard the bolt unlatch he twisted the knob and pushed with his substantial limbs past me. He was muscular, and he often had leverage, using his long runner’s legs as a wedge. It’s really just simple machines. I turned from the door as I pushed it closed and saw him standing in the center of my sanctuary. My books, my livelihood, were the backdrop of this invading horde of one. The chandelier I had installed many summers ago was directly above him, its crystal shards casting dancing shadows on his thick blonde hair. He was older than me by five years, and my hair was beginning to thin. As I looked at him now, illuminated from above like some moribund angel, I saw myself his physical opposite. I thought about quitting smoking and cholesterol, thought about quitting all my research and taking up sailing, and he spoke: “It smells like piss in here Charlie.”
    “It does not,” I said as I reapplied the lock. “It’s the cigar. It’s still smoldering in the ashtray. I was enjoying it thoroughly before you knocked, before you ruined it.”
    “Yeah, I’m a ruiner. If you didn’t lock the damn door I wouldn’t have to knock,” he said to me, his marble-like cobalt eyes following my every step as I strode over my authentic Persian rug back to my red leather chair behind the mahogany desk. My favorite chair, the one I had imported from Italy.
    I sat down, the smoke from my cigar slithering around me like tendrils, altered by my movement. I sat while he stood. I was still in control, but I was struck by what he said. It made sense but made no sense. It was like a woman’s logic, burrowing into my brain like a parasite and sapping any ability to respond intelligently. He was a widower and evidently he picked up a few tricks during his time with his wife, as short and messy as it was. Her death weighed on him immensely, though he’d never admit it. So I shrugged, at a loss for words. I found I was not as articulate in spoken discourse.
    He smiled at me. Damn his smile, the smile of conquest. I’ve seen that smile many times growing up here in rural Vermont. While Father and Mother were out in the cities at the benefits and galas and charity balls, celebrating their popularity and genius, we were at home, in the monolithic Saint St. castle. He was in charge, always in charge, being five years my elder, and as I read my books he devised plans to yield for himself that exasperating smile as the end result. And after Mother died, and Father became reclusive and prone to unpredictable behavior, that smile became a symbol of our dysfunction.
    He knew he had destroyed my solitude, kicked over my king and ground it into the dirt with his heel. So now, he would gloat. “I’m going out with a few old friends, from high school, lifetimes ago. I hope you don’t mind being alone in this place,” he asked in a tone a mongoose would use on a cobra.
    But I still had venom. “Of course not. You are my guest, so you shall do as you please,” I muttered through my teeth. Of course I minded. Even now I remembered the friends he kept back then, sons of debutantes and harlots and malefactors, and not one of them ever liked me. They were always interested, Archie included, in girls and getting out of Vermont. I was never concerned with these things though. Friends were something for which he was much more suited and he knew it, dangling like a carrot his popularity before me at every opportunity. But I once loved a girl, who loved me, and cosmology and astronomy and William Blake, but she became a woman who loved dinner parties and cosmetology and psychology. It is such a soft science, psychology, assessing imaginaries and frivolities. Archie did not love anything as much as the girl I loved did psychology, but he forced himself to learn the subject to steal her attentions from me. She eventually grew disinterested in the subject, as she did all things except Archie, He however  was never interested in her, just in acquiring something he thought I had he did not. Shortly after stealing her from me he fled to California.
    Archie laughed, and as he laughed, I thought I felt an imaginary, a frivolity, bubbling from the pits of my ether like Lazarus from his grave. It was anger. “Confound it Archie, I’m working! Go out with your thick headed friends, those roustabouts, but leave me in peace! This is my house, act accordingly.”
    He stopped laughing, his face became the voice of seriousness, of determination. I felt small again, like a child watching worriedly, as though he were Lady Macbeth and I was nothing to him but a damned spot. “How many times do I have to tell you not to talk like a goddamned weirdo. And this is not your house, not yet. It’s Father’s. Not yours. You just live in it.”
    “Attend to its function,” I corrected meekly.
    “House sit,” he said. “He’s been in the hospice for what, a week?”
    “Nine days, but I moved here two years ago, remember? To help him around the house? He was too weak to do many things.”
    “Yeah, I remember. He asked me, did you know that? He asked me to move in before he asked you, but I was in California.”
    “Maintaining the vehicles of the starlets? With Beth? ”
    He glared at me. Immediately after uttering that cursed name I felt low, mangy. Dastardly. To mention the name of his departed wife, only gone eleven months, was like reminding Orpheus where his lover could be found.
    “Yes,” she answered, the word sliding from his lips like the oil he was so adept at changing. “With Beth. So I couldn’t come. But you could and you did, because you‘re a whatever-you-are. And now he’ll be dead very soon, and I accept that. And he accepts that. I’ve spoken with him, a few times.”
    “I research. I’m a researcher. I write papers. Right now I’m doing a paper on-”
     He interrupted me. “I don’t care, Charlie. That’s not the point. The point is, this isn’t your house, it’s Father’s house, and until he’s dead and buried it’s gonna stay that way. When the will expressly says, ‘I’m givin’ all my s**t to Charlie,’ that’s when it’s your house. Now sit here in Dad’s study, in Dad’s chair, reading Dad’s books, and I’m going out.”
    With that said, with that damage done, he turned underneath the chandelier Father installed many summers ago, crossed Father’s Persian rug, and let himself out, the door swinging ajar behind him. I helped install that chandelier, I handed him the tools while he stood on the ladder, little bits of plaster falling like snowflakes onto the Persian rug I picked for him out of a catalog. I listened for the sound of him leaving, of his car’s engine turning over and him driving away, and when I at last heard these dulcet tones I called the hospice. No one answered. I adjusted my weight in Father’s red leather chair, the one he had imported from Italy, and waited.
----
    The phone rang, loud as a klaxon on the mahogany desk, jolting me from dreamless sleep. I must have drifted off, pen still in my hand, as I took down notes from the leather-bound tomes stacked waist high around me. I took the phone in my hand and brought it to my ear, thinking only of Father, wishing to hear him on the other end, telling me this disease would be beaten with a little faith and bourbon. But it was not him, it was Archie.
    “Little brother?” he asked. His tone was solemn and I’ve only heard it twice before, the latter time only a year ago. I was furious.
    “Why did they call you? I’ve been here! I’ve been-”
    He interrupted me again. “I don’t know. He’s dead, Charlie. Just worry about that.” He hung up.
----
    We met at the hospice a few hours later. He was already there, as I assumed he’d be, his hands in his coat pockets, standing outside like he was waiting for a bus. He greeted me with a nod, averting his bloated red eyes, then he spoke quietly. “They said his last words were gibberish.”
    “What were they?” I asked him. I wanted to go inside and see him, to see for myself, to make sure Archie was not hoodwinking me, but upon further rumination I realized he could not possibly be doing so, just looking at him like this, his glasses fogged up from labored mouth-breathing between chest-wracking sobs I was only barely too late to witness.
    He looked at me, with those puffy blue marbles. “Something like ‘Don’t do anything without each other, like go around digging.’ Does it mean anything to you?”  
    “No,” I told him. Most things Father said the last two years were meaningless. Before he was confined to his bed, he acted mysteriously, spending many hours in the back yard. If asked his occupation, he would not answer. “I think, Archie, we should go home.”
    “Home? I’ll know it when I get there.”
    Home or not, I coaxed him into Father’s car, my car, and drove back through the winding mountain roads to the St. Street monolith.  
-----
    It was many days later, after the funeral, and we were in the office of Father’s attorney. The man was very old, like all the furniture here. Ancient. The hair in the attorney’s ear and nose could possibly be measured for length to determine age, but I had neither the energy or desire to do so. Archie was beside me, staring vacantly out the window. Since the funeral he had been distant. The death affected him deeply apparently, though he’d comforted himself with Father’s stock of bourbon. He told me he’d accepted the happenings, the wasting away, but he lied. I was also changed. I felt lost.
    Now father’s attorney sat before us, his name, Z. Horowitz, inscribed in bold typeface on a gold placard angled obnoxiously toward us. He was flipping through a stack of papers, clearly disorganized. I nudged Archie with my elbow, my arms crossed against my chest, and he looked at me, his hair disheveled and the rings under his cobalt marbles prominent. He mouthed the word, “what?”
    I motioned toward Horowitz. This place offended my senses, the dust lining the shelves housing antiquated legal tomes blanketing everything, like a nuclear winter’s snow in morning. And it smelled like an old man here, a smell from which I cannot possibly get away. I thought I was going to have to burn down the old castle to once and for all rid myself of that damned smell. Archie just shook his head.
    Suddenly Horowitz flicked his hazy gaze toward me. With a cough that shuddered his core, he spoke: “Gentlemen, allow me to start. First of all, it‘s a real shame. There weren‘t many in your daddy‘s mold. Years we were pals. Before you two came along we chased the girls and what-have-you. But hooey, we got some business here. I have your father’s last will and testament,” he shook a manila folder. “I’ll read it.”
    And so he began, “Ahem. ‘My name is Richard Clarke Price. I am of sound mind and judgment, writing this will. How depressing this is, preparing for my impending death. Right now Zachariah is reading this, hopefully to someone that is not forced to be there against their will.’” Archie scoffed.
    Horowitz glanced up at him, confused. His hearing was failing, and some sounds were beginning to confuse him. I know this because I’ve seen it before, the look of perplexity, of senses possibly betraying reality. It is haunting. After a few seconds of silence (for Archie and myself, though admittedly he could be hearing something unknown to us), he continued reading: “Allow me to begin dividing my possessions amongst those surviving me. Of course I really couldn’t care less, because I’m dead. But to avoid any complications for my sons and mistresses, if there are any mistresses, I suppose I’ll attach nametags to my many objects. How long have I lived, collecting things that are of no use to me now? Many wasted years, my friends and audience. All right, I’m sure by now my sons, if they bothered to show up, are either staring pensively out the window, hung over on his father’s bourbon, or sitting with his arms crossed, silently judging everything around him, so I shall begin.
    “I’ll start with my sons, the only men in my life I never wanted to strangle (very badly or very often.) To the eldest, Archimedes Joshua Price…” Archie winced. Our real names were always a source of embarrassment, a lasting burden shouldered to us by Father, complicating formal conversations with less intelligent people. Father had told us many times that we’d grow into the names, become great men, but that’s little consolation on the first day of school. “…I leave half of my house and all its contents. Which half is something he’ll have to work out with his brother, Charlemagne Blythe Price, who gets the other half. All bank assets and whatever else go to them as well, down the middle. Hell, just give everything I’ve got to them, who cares? Not me. Anyway, their mother, bless her soul, the cranky drunk, is dead as dirt, just like me, and that part about mistresses earlier, that was just wishful thinking. I haven’t had a mistress in 25 years.”
    I did the math in my head.
    “There’s one more thing. The yard. There’s a surprise in there for my boys. But tell them they have to work together for once, to stop competing, to find it.
    “Okay, that’s it. I’m dead, Zachariah and whoever else is there isn’t. I hope. Have fun living the rest of your lives, my friends. Can’t wait to say hello. You’ll be here soon enough if you don‘t work together for once.”
    -------
    “Hand me the monkey wrench,” Archie said. His shirt was covered in dirt and soot, but his blue marbles were illuminated from within. He looked alert, something I haven’t seen in a long time. The crude map Father had drawn on the back of his will was stuffed into his front pocket.
    While I was looking at him, I realized I had no idea what a monkey wrench was. I couldn’t discern the identities of all these tools, especially in the dimness of the moonlight. I expected to be bludgeoned with whatever strange object he was asking for then chained in the basement, screaming for him to stop while he built the walls around me. But he just held out his hand expectantly.
    “Uh, Charlie? The wrench.”
    “Which one is the monkey wrench? None looks like an ape, or a orangutan.”
    Archie laughed. “You have a doctorate in medieval studies and you can’t pick out a monkey wrench?”
    I shrugged. About three hours ago we came out here as per Father’s will’s instruction. It was a treasure map, with dotted lines and a big boldfaced X. It was daylight then, but this was taking much longer than expected. We were looking for a surprise, but instead we found a morass of ancient weeds and wild growth, which I suppose was indeed a surprise. Neither of us have been out here in our entire lives, it was forbidden. This was Father’s yard. This was where he went to think, to garden, to descend into madness. After Mother’s death Father split his time between his (my) study and this yard. We only spied him in fleeting, looking much like Archie did now, mumbling about his life’s work.
    “The monkey wrench is the one that can kill Colonel Mustard in the observatory,” Archie told me.
    I found the one he described and handed it to him. Neither of us knew what we were looking for, but we’ve slowly made progress in one direction. Our thinking was that if we just kept trudging forward we’d find something, like two explorers hacking through the rainforest. With the monkey wrench he started loosening a pipe he had unearthed with a shovel, while I sat on what looked like a chair.
    “So Charlie, what are we gonna do with this place? It depresses me.” Archie asked breathlessly.
    “I don’t want to go anywhere.” I told him. I was comfortable, wrapped up in memories and books.
    He scoffed. “You need to get out of this tomb. At least it feels like a tomb. Go someplace else. Go to the ocean, meet some girls.”
    Father’s death had changed us. We hardly spoke before it, but now, he wouldn’t stop talking. “I don’t need to meet some girls. I have work to do.”
    “Oh come on, Charlie. You’ll never know what you’re missing.”
    Of course I wouldn’t know. I’ve only ever cared enough about one woman. Only one woman was worth postponing my studies for, but Archie ruined it like he ruined everything else. “Maybe you could tell me what I’m missing. You would know.”
    He stopped wrenching what was probably the water main and looked at me over his shoulder. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “You know what it means,” I mumbled to the floor.
    “I can’t hear you. What?”
    “I said you know what it means,” I replied nervously.
    “Listen, if this is about Violet, that girl, I’m sorry all right? She was cute and funny or something, but believe me, she wasn’t worth it.”
    “Wasn’t worth it? She was worth it to me, you rake!” I snapped.
    He laughed. “Rake? Seriously? People in real life don’t talk like the alchemists in your moldy books. And yeah, not worth it. I ran into her when I went out the other day, the day dad died. I invited her over, you know, before we found out about dad.”
    We both paused briefly, casting our eyes to the dirt and rocks of the moonlit ground, then I spoke: “What did she say? Did she remember you? Or ask for me?”
    “Yes, and yes.”
    I was excited. I was feeling things I hadn’t felt in many years, all these imaginaries billowing out of nothingness. It distressed me. “Tell me about it.”
    “Look at you! Acting like a real person again, showing excitement,” he said, and I was embarrassed. All these feelings. Damn them. “But yeah, she asked about you, asked if you were around, locked somewhere away, isolated from society. I told her yeah.”
    I had nothing to say. It was true. I was locked away. I had work to do, but I began to think maybe work was something which, with occasionally going out into the world, I could divide my time.
    I changed the subject. “Have you found anything yet?”
    “No, nothing. I think the old man was not exactly of sound mind and judgment. Still got a lot of crap to get through.”
------
    We both agreed a person should leave the yard, to go into the sepulcher-like yellow house, and make sandwiches. I was nominated, so I went to the kitchen and began to fulfill my duties, then the doorbell rang. I looked at my watch, knife in hand, twisting my wrist and flinging a strand of butter to the ceiling. It was two in the morning. I should be asleep, not digging around for buried treasure. I turned the valve on the sink, but nothing came out. Peculiar.
    I went to the front door, the portcullis to this castle, and asked loudly, “Who’s there?” Another interloper trying to gain access to my sanctuary, another locked door between us. There was no answer, so I opened it.
    It was Violet. “I’m not going to shout through wood, Charlie,” she said. I stared at her. She was hardly different, still beautiful, still fiery, but she long since traded her camouflage jacket and combat boots in for a more attractive ensemble. It was an improvement. She stared right back at me and behind those eyes I saw the drive that forced three teachers into early retirement and caused several disciplinary actions taken against her. “Are you going to let me in there or has it been declared a health hazard yet?”
    I motioned for her to enter, and she did, brushing by me, trailing her scent under my nose. I followed her to the kitchen, where she shoved her head into the refrigerator. “There’s nothing in here I would ever eat.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “Would you like me to order out? Oh wait, it’s two in the morning. What are you doing here?”
    “So?” She closed the refrigerator. “Where’s your brother?”
    “Is that it? Coming back for him again?” I was upset. All these emotions, these frivolities. My father was dead, but in death he had a greater effect on me than he ever did while he was alive.
    “What do you mean, ‘is that it?’” she asked, jumping up onto the counter. She began to dangle her feet, wrapped in black heels, swinging like pendulums. “Your brother, he tell you we bumped into each other?”
    I nodded.
    “Did he tell you what we talked about?”
    “No. He’s in the backyard, by the way, digging holes, looking for buried treasure.” This was too much talking for me. I longed for my study.
    She ignored me. “All we talked about was you, Charlie. ‘What’s Charlie doing? What’s he up to?’ And he told me you sit in your dad’s office while he sits in a hospital and he told me you hate everything and everyone.”
    “It’s a study.”
    “What?”
    “It’s a study. Not an office. And Father’s dead now.”
    She looked surprised, genuinely so. “Oh, I’m sorry, I hadn’t heard.”
    “It’s okay. I have to go back outside now,” I mumbled. I had no idea how to communicate with a person like Violet. She was a tiger. So I left her in the kitchen, or at least I tried to. She hopped down from the counter and followed me outside, her heels clicking on the tiles like a machine gun. What love I thought I felt for a creature like her years ago must really have been a less noble feeling, but that didn’t make them any less persistent now.   
--------
    Archie tossed down the shovel. “Where’re my sandwiches?”
    “I have them, but I brought something else as well,” I said, motioning toward Violet. I looked around the yard. Several holes have been dug, and he was working on another, well away from the house now. Water was erupting from the third hole. Apparently it was the water main after all.
    “So, hello Violet,” he said. “back for my soul?”
    “Look at you all covered in dirt. You look like a gravedigger.”
    “Someone’s gotta do this. Do you see Charlie doing any manual labor? Little lord Fauntleroy?” Archie pointed at me. He did look like a grave digger.
    I interjected. “You volunteered to shovel. I wasn’t going to argue, and I must say, Violet, that was in bad taste. Our father has recently passed.” Then I saw something attached to the end of the shovel. It looked like a plastic bag. I bent to examine it, and discovered something inside. A note, written in Father’s slanted hand. I began to read aloud while Archie and Violet listened: “Moments of unexpected sweetness hiding in obtuse phrasing aim to resurrect romance. It is afternoon; the sun is concealed behind the bloated clouds. The pavement is tepid, but not too balmy, and discomfort is disavowed, despite the fact the black trenches emanate heat. I don't think of self-reflection in terms of self; many succeed through enormous achievements and feats, accruing ligature and wealth; a level of success is gained, though, by living as a result of self-preservation. To be gauche in reference, to think uncouthly of yourself, to be unabashedly egocentric, to be coarsely imperceptive; this is what reference is. Life is deceptive; holding a fixation in deference is idolism; but idolism is an unadventurous archetype; knowing oneself is knowing the world;  moreover at origin one's mind is subsequently overripe. Nothing has changed after all. The trenches still emanate heat. Consider that the obligatory complication; all else leads to dynamic disorientation. Only through perceptive inquiry and simultaneous operation does one shed incredulity; know one, know one's world. Consequence and transcendence, fear and disembodiment; know one, know the universe. Scurrilous thought, then to one’s life traverse. It is uncommon to distinguish nonentity to oneself. Years within radiate incensed heat; dyed opaque basis hotness to augment. The similarity to a trench life is to an infinite extent, conjuring up a nasal voice from the pits of the mind; flustered uncivilization, an unrepeatable descent. Yes I know I am terse; I know my intentions are thwarted, but intent to determine being's utmost transcendence, I know everyone is mystic, everyone is me, and one can know oneself through others to an unlimited degree. -R.C. PRICE.”
    Violet and Archie stared at me, then Archie spoke: “What the hell was that? I swear to God, if that’s the treasure I’m going to burn the house down.”
    “This is treasure,” I told him. “But there’s something else in this hole.” I kneeled, trying to brush the dirt off the object. I was getting my hands dirty, and it made me uncomfortable, all this earth creating a film on my fingers and embedding itself under my nails, but damn it, I didn’t care. My father’s legacy was in that hole, and I wasn’t going to let Violet see anyone but me discover what treasures were hidden.
    “What is it?” Violet asked, leaning over me, her perfume drifting into my nasal cavities. A chill slid down my spine like an ice cube across a frying pan.
    I brushed off the last of the loose dirt covering the object. Archie stood over us, trying to appear aloof. “It’s probably nothing, just another ancient piece of crap, like everything in that house. Nothing is worth anything and he knows it. He’s f*****g with us,” Archie said, gazing at the moon, distant in the horizon.
    “It’s a box,” I told them. “A wooden box. But I can’t get it out.” I was pulling on it but it seemed to be fastened to something in the ground.
    Archie watched me struggle in the hole, a smug look creeping across his mongoloid face. “Havin’ trouble there, little brother?” he asked, then kneeled beside me. Brushing me aside, he tried lifting the box from the hole, but he also failed. “It’s attached to something in the ground,” he huffed.
    “I know that.”
    “Hand me the crowbar, it looks like it might open from the top,” Archie said, again ordering me around like a subordinate. But Violet was here, watching.
    I could not appear so weak and ignorant of men’s pursuits of adventure and hand tools. I picked up the first thing my dirt-encrusted hand could reach and confidently offered it to his outstretched paw. Violet laughed and said, “That’s not a crowbar, Charlie. That’s a hand rake.”
    I watched her identify in the pile of tools lying on the grass what was apparently the crowbar. As she handed to Archie I asked, “Does no one else find the animal names of all these tools odd?”
    They both glanced at each other, then at me. Evidently they did not. Archie wedged the crowbar into a crack in the box and pulled up with his tree trunk arms. He always had the leverage. With a snap, the lid of the box swung open on rusty hinges. We each leaned over the hole to get a better look at the box’s contents.
    Violet spoke first: “It’s a button.”
    And it was, a big circular red button, like the one in secret bunkers the president would press to exterminate once and for all the evil communists. It was mounted on a metal cube with thick black wires running from it. My eyes followed the wires out of the wooden box through a oval cut from the bottom and into the dirt at the base of the hole. Etched in tiny letters on the button’s face were the words “Push Me.”
    “Well?” said Archie. “Should I?”
    At that moment I was struck with another concrete feeling, another palpable emotion. Jealousy. Why should he get to press the button? I slaved in that despicable tomb for two years, catering to Father’s every whim, cleaning messes no rational person could even think to create. I should get to press the button. “Wait a moment, Archie. I think I should press it.”
    “What? Why?” he asked me, trying to intimidate me with his cobalt marbles. Violet sat down in the grass. She recognized a stalemate, she’d seen them before, some over her.
    “Because I deserve it. Where were you while I was in there, with Father? Traipsing around California, with your wife and friends? I was here, Archie. I should press the button.”
    “You chose to be here. I was too busy with my career to just drop everything and come to Vermont, but you were already here!”
    “Career? You check oil.”
    “You write books no one reads.”
    “You’re a curmudgeon!”
    “I’m a what?”
    “Never mind. I’ve had enough of this. It is my right as Father’s caretaker that-”
    A voice interrupted me, a lilting flower of a voice. Violet. She said: “Excuse me? Watch this.”
    We both snapped our heads in her direction. She had crawled to the hole, her arm stretched to its limit, her skin radiant in the moonlight. Her finger traced the tiny letters on the face of the button. She smiled and did as it asked.
    Nothing happened except for a quiet “click.” I don’t know what I was expecting, some sign from Father, some proof that all this was not the last gasp of a fleeting mind. But it was, and the fleeting mind clicks.
    Archie said, shrugging his broad shoulders, “Well that was anticlima-”
    Then the house exploded.
------
    After the initial shock, we stopped cowering under our arms and watched the old castle ablaze. We sat next to each other in the grass, Violet between us. It would be several more minutes before anyone came to put the fire out, how distant we were out here. Debris had been falling everywhere, even as far away as we were, and some things could be recognized, even while it burned. Father’s favorite chair landed amongst the trees to our left, a melting husk of red leather, like an walrus in a volcano.
    “Everything was in that house,” I said quietly. “Everything.”
    “Not everything,” Archie told me. “Do you have the sandwiches?”
    I handed them to him. Violet laughed and said, “I guess, Charlie, that you’re gonna leave the house for once after all.”
    “I guess so. I always wanted to take up sailing.”
    Archie swallowed the bite of the sandwich he was destroying. “You know we’re rich right?”
    “Oh?” I asked. Everything seemed so surreal. But in a good way, bizarrely.
    He answered, “Between the money he left us and the money we’ll get in insurance, yeah, I’d say we’re rich.”
    “Do you want to buy a sailboat?”
    “No, but if you do I’ll ride along.”
    The flames were casting dancing shadows on the trees around us. When the fire crews  arrived they were going to have a difficult time putting out the blaze with a busted water main, but nothing about this place really mattered much anymore.
    Archie turned to Violet and asked her if she also would like to sail. Again, my brother was overstepping his bounds. I felt another emotion clawing its way up from oblivion, though, despite everything. Happiness. I smiled and said, “I think it’s time to finally go.”

© 2010 vukcic


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Added on July 10, 2010
Last Updated on July 10, 2010

Author

vukcic
vukcic

Lapeer, MI



About
I write because there's absolutely no reason not to. For anyone. more..

Writing
The Way Up The Way Up

A Stage Play by vukcic