9.27.17

He left.
Abandoned, this was the thing,
the term, the perfect verbiage
for what happened,
an emptiness created from nothing.
Particular to the extreme.
Every facet of the event
personalized & annotated & filed
in immediate memory.
It was not the family.
It was him and him alone.
The pain’s radius a tight circle
enveloping his child body
preserving all the elements
as they were at that time. Because
that’s when it split, his life, his eternal timeline.
The Rebirth,
time synced up to a single catastrophe,
before & after.
He was playing video games, Zelda
songs of the forest,
fairies & time travel & green tunics.
His father still had the knife in his hand
standing in the doorway, swaying,
a bit uneasy in the legs.
He called Prater a name random and unestablished,
champ, junior.
They never talked like this.
Father & son,
emotionally reserved & incapable,
they kept a steady distance
always sure to turn away
when feelings swelled up and became insufferable.
His father swayed.
Lower lip swollen,
he drooled words & mumbled information,
where he was going & why & what had happened,
the event,
the noise
from the kitchen,
the clash of several metals and a woman’s scream.
The knife glinted bloodless in an unknown light.
And his father swayed.
He rocked on his heels like a neanderthal.
Prater broke from the screen just once and briefly.
He captured in a second’s glance the terror of a man demolished,
and turned away,
back to the digital world,
the open map,
where he galloped on the back of a stallion
toward pinkmisted mountains & a castle in the distance.

Written at 12:27 at night, in my office, in Agoura Hills CA.