When We Forget

I had a dream last night that lit up a flame.  I'm not sure why it did.  It had nothing to do with things that are going on in my life right now.  There is some truth, some part of my life in this story, so you could say it's a bit close to me, but it is not the story of my life.  There's only a fragment in there.

I don't normally write in first person, but this one sorta...wrote itself in first person you could say.  I also don't normally write in anything but a fantasy realm, so this was different for me.

I don't want to say more about it right now, but enjoy something that came from a dream!  I might write more of this later.

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It was a warm day when my brother and I went to see our dad.  It was somewhere between summer and fall when the leaves begin to cover the ground, but the air is far too hot to be rolling into fall.  It had been a very long time since either of us had seen our father.  Our mother remarried when we were very young and we moved far away from him.  But that doesn’t matter, because we’re here to see him now.

We sat on the porch in silence looking out through the half screened porch.  I ran my fingers idly down the lower, wooden part of the wall.  The wood was aged and dark, a mix of black, gray and a greenish brown.  The screen of the upper wall was widely knit together.  It was gray, but so covered in rust it was hard to believe it was made from metals.

The air buzzed in that way that places full of heat usually do.  Outside the ground was mostly barren, consisting of white hot sand that covered nearly everything.  There were patches of brown and yellow leaves that looked as if they had fallen many many years before.  Patches of bare trees with fragments of the same brown and yellow leaves granted some relief from the sun that bore down.

After what felt like hours of sitting in silence, I turned to my brother and asked, “Should we go see him now?”

He took a minute to reply as he studied the wooden floor of the porch.  He nodded slowly and stood, offering me his arm, “Yeah, I think it’s time.”

I slipped my arm through his and we strolled from the porch and into the barren heat.  I was glad that I had brought the floppy straw hat I wore.  It helped block out some of the heat, but not all of it.  My brother wore a simple black fedora.  I used to make fun of him about it, but it really looked quite dashing on him.

The leaves stirred as we made our way across the sand.  In the distance I could see where our father rested.  We were so young when we last saw him that neither of us really could remember what he looked like.  Even two years older than me, my brother couldn’t describe him.

We stopped in front of a short black iron gate that was rusted with the many years and the little amount of rain that it had seen in its lifetime.  My brother opened the gate for me and I stepped through, waiting just to the side for him.  my hand slipped into his and we approached slowly, both knowing that we were about to come face to face with the truth.

Tall brown grass had covered most of the clearing.  Stones that were once shaped into all sorts of forms scattered across the clearing worn down with time.  We approached a newer stone and paused there.  My hand slipped out of my brothers and I knelt down, brushing dirt to read the inscription.

“So this is where he is.”  I said.

I settled on the aged grass, my hands folded in my lap.  My brother simply stood with his hand resting on the headstone, his head bowed and his other hand stuffed into his pocket

“That seems to be the case.” He said.

“I wish I had known him better before he died.”

“I do too.”