Glittercrumb Trail - remembering my parents (an excerpt)

It starts with a dream.  A late night wrapped thick in the dark hollow places and spaces that rest furtive between sleep and unease.  I am perched at the top of a gaping stairwell, balanced on the edge of a candle’s glow and the exact line between known and unseen.  An inch wide and an aeon deep, an impossible disquieting measure of frightful unknown.

And through the dark throat of descent at my feet, I see an iridescent crescent of light swaying faintly from a faraway room, a wooden skeleton of beams, symbiotic function and potential in symmetry, and ripe heavy with possibility.  Soft hints of stained yellow emanate from the single bulb, golden hues thrown in discordant rhythms against unfinished walls.  Distortions pulling my ears, aural arms reaching in and out of inky black darkness, pulsing peripheries all around.  Muffled, incoherent reverberations roll with tiny screams and cry bursts and guttural hush tides, and the walls begin to breathe heavy in unison with the pounding drums in my chest.

Back and forth sways of light and then a brilliant shine glint cuts through the pendulum glow, drawing my eyes with magnetic force. A tiny ruby lays at my feet, and another on the top step, and still two more below that.  A glittercrumb trail distraction from the thickening distress filling my lungs and legs and head, the shiny red sparkle clearing my capillaries and easing my breath.  Tiptoe descent along the shimmering stream and, like an evening tide melts a sand castle with foregone conclusion, darkness wraps the top of the stairs where I had just stood.  I am running but the stairs disappear one by one below my feet as more and more rubies appear, an unexpected flash stone tide rolling faster than my feet can take me.

And waves distorting sounds in my ears wring tautly into one, long even-pitched wail, as sharp and brilliant as the minute razor edge of each of the million rubies swirling.

And the quicker I move and the faster I run, all the world’s motion around me slows into a faded film flicker, every vision refracting on each particle of the red surface lapping beneath and up and all around me.

And the burly shape of my father forms and rolls into view, all anger and rage and deafening loud, his face obscured by a dark toxic oil spill pouring from his mouth, liquid bullet ribbons gushing and hurling micro slow through molasses in time and space.  And standing before him, all hurt and fear and trembling, the body of my mother, ever slight and drenched thick in a frenzied tapestry of red hues and hysteria, her nonsensical retaliations flailing.

This, my parents.  Their dance a bedlammed cyclone, an eye-storm vortex cementing chaotic whirlwind into tempestuous permanence.  Their arms outstretched and entwined in poisonous infinity, and from the gaping slit above my mother’s left eye a torrent of rubies.  A glistening waterfall of red diamonds, the tumbling source of the bottomless red ocean swirl swallowing us three.  And from her eyes, heavy stone tears that turned it all to inky black.

And as each of us three were one by one consumed and rendered stone, I knew beyond certainty they hadn’t seen me, and I was utterly alone.