You poke your head into the attic and shine your flashlight around to illuminate the small, dusty space. It isn't big enough for you to stand at your full height, so you crouch. It seems to run the length of the house, which you offhandedly figure is probably very unusual for attics. You crawl across the hardwood floor of the attic, and with each movement, you displace a fine layer of dust that wafts up to find a new home in your lungs. You cough, waving your free hand in a desperate attempt to dissipate the unyielding dust that clings to absolutely everything in the attic. There are boxes everywhere. You shine your light across a few of them just to read the labels. You see, some boxes are labeled as 'Costumes' and some are labeled 'Scrapbooks.' You wonder if there could be any baby photos of you inside of any of the scrapbooks. Your father was always detached and never spoke to you about his home life or upbringing. Your mom left and never looked back, and he never spoke of her either. In fact, now that you think about it, you truly have no way of knowing if she had been your maternal or paternal grandmother. You ponder for a moment and realize she must have been your father's mother because you had the same last name. You remember having seen it on the deed to the house. You wonder how your dad is doing. Since you dropped out of school, he refused to look at you, refused to speak to you. He forced you out of the house to couch surf with whatever friends you still had, whatever acquaintances took pity on you, or just the park. The park was more and more your sleeping arrangement as every time you hit up an old connection; they were increasingly less likely to let you crash than they had been the time before. In the two years you've been fending for yourself, he never once reached out to you. You wonder if he treats you like his mother or your own mother, for that matter. Simply going silent and stone-faced whenever anybody brings you up to him in conversation. You keep looking and crawl to the boxes and open the one nearest to you. You groan; it is full of nothing but pinstripe candy. You open another, it is full of tissue paper. You open a third box and see that its sole contents, despite having been a pretty sizable cardboard box, is a singular glasses case. There is nothing particularly fancy about the glasses case. Nothing fancy enough to warrant it having had its own private box to sit in. You pick it up and reguard it curiously. It looks like every other glasses case you have ever seen in your life. Black and slightly bean-shaped. It looks to have been made out of leather. You shrug; you have no idea how leather needs to be kept in order to keep its integrity. You knew that there was a difference between genuine and faux leather. The real deal was seen as fancier for some unknown reason when they looked exactly the same to you. The fake stuff seemed like less work, anyway. You didn't know what kind of care real leather needed, only that it needed some kind of tedious upkeep and would look like absolute shit if you neglected it. You think of a girl you knew in the sixth grade who, admittedly, was kind of a bitch. (or maybe she was just 13, and everyone was a bitch at 13. It was like an undeniably unifying human experience) She had invited the entire class to her birthday over the summer, and since her parents got divorced and she was staying with her mom, you knew those guilty daddy gifts were gonna be phenomenal. And they were. She had a mountain of gifts, the most expensive of which had been a genuine leather purse. She took that thing everywhere, and you knew saw she treated that thing. It went out in the cold and the heat and in rain and in shine. It went to the movies, waterparks, and pools. It went wherever she went, and by the end of the summer, the poor purse was in tatters. Totally unrecognizable from the purse it had previously been. You remember your friends trying to console the girl while behind her back; all secretly pleased that the purse had gotten ruined. It felt like a deserved comeuppance because that girl was a real bitch. (But then again, you were all bitches back then.) You figure the glasses case must indeed be real leather, and you open the case to see what kind of glasses could be inside. You shine your flashlight onto them and realize with faint surprise that they are not reading glasses at all but instead are a pair of dark-tinted circular-shaped sunglasses. They must be ancient to have been sitting in this old musty attack for god only knows how long, and yet, they felt sleek and modern. Fashionable even. You definitely would have pocketed these if you came across them in a store. You set the glasses back down into the case and slip the case into the pocket of the flannel. You crawl backward down and out of the attic once more. You can't wait to try these bad boys on.
