Catch ThirtyThree

Chapter Thirteen (Sum)

Vision will blind. Severance ties. Median am I. True are all lies.

 

Katherine watched out the window of her Crown Victoria taxi, her twenty-nine year-old son to her left and his six year-old daughter to his. For the first time in thirty years, she would be seeing her ex-husband, whom she had divorced on the grounds that he wasn’t safe to be around. He spent all day talking about insane theories of the stars and the skies, but never any time with her or their children. He would obsess over the notebook that he had, and when she tried taking it, he hit her. They hadn’t spoken for months, but he had sent him a letter so he knew he was a grandfather. This would be the first time he’d had ever seen the little one.

The taxi driver pulled up to the sidewalk just in front of a broken-down house, missing roof panels and had boarded-up windows. Katherine’s eyes widened. Was this the place he was been living in?

The trio got up and out of the car, and hesitantly walked up to the door. Katherine took a breath and knocked lightly on the door, which seemed to be barely holding on. Carter, her son, reached over and banged on it.

“Dad! It’s us.” He yelled with a deep, strong voice. His hand was firmly gripped on his daughter’s.

The door creaked open after he banged on it. They slowly entered and immediately stepped back outside; the stench within was foul and piercing, that of a septic tank. Carter told his daughter to stay with grandma, and she did as they stayed outside while he entered.

Inside the place was trashed. Dishes stood high and dirty all over the kitchen, like he had never washed one in his life and only bought new ones. The walls, once white, were yellow and brown and cracking, filled with holes like Swiss cheese. The floor had long since given way to the dirt beneath, with some remnants of tiles scattered across the ground. A cracked dining table stood in between the kitchen and living room, which were adjacent. It was knocked over, and the chair broken in half. A black mug with white lettering, reaidng “Instinct” was on the floor as well. Some form of liquid, probably tea, had spilled all over the floor. Carter covered his mouth and nose to get away from the smell, and he turned and looked down the hallway, equally cracked and crumbling, and gasped. He ran down the hallway, stooping at the end and screaming for his mother to call an ambulance. There, sprawled out in the hallway with his notebook on his chest and a look of pure and utter horror, lay his father’s cold body.

                  The funeral was short and not many people showed up. Katherine; Carter and his child; May, Katherine’s daughter; and Ms. Buxbee, the nextdoor neighbor of eighty-eight who took care of their father.

                  “Why is grandpa dead, daddy?” asked Carter’s daughter.

                  “Because, Amy, sometimes it’s just the right time for people to move on. He devoted his whole life to something he loved, it’s time to go on to the next one to see what’s held in store.”

                  As they began piling dirt on top of the coffin, Carter tossed in the notebook that his father had worked years on. If he were to live with the damn thing, he would die with it as well. One in the same, together forever, pieces of a whole that the world would not and could not understand. 

                The living paradox.