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eBook Category: Fantasy
eBook Description: While his parents consider a divorce, a small boy stays with his grandparents in the country and delves into a fantasy world of his own making.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Berkeley Poets Cooperative, 1975
Fictionwise Release Date: December 2002

15 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [47 KB], eReader (PDB) [23 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [9 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [8 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [61 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [80 KB], hiebook (KML) [49 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [35 KB], iSilo (PDB) [7 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [9 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [37 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [15 KB]
Words: 2485
Reading time: 7-9 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

One night when I was about six years old, my mother, father and self were grouped about the kitchen table consuming a common meal when an uncommon event transpired. Accepting the vagaries and bloomings of a six-year-old's perceptual framework, granting the distortions of time and memory, this is what I recall.

Both my parents rocketed to their feet, accompanied by flying stringbeans and toppling chairs. Both mother and father rushed to the cupboards and began hauling down kettles, pots, saucepans. Both filled them with water from our taps--my mother in the kitchen, my father kneeling by the tub in the bathroom--and placed them atop our deluxe O'Keefe and Merrit with all six burners popping full blast. Immediately the kitchen began to fill with steam. I remember my logic at the time: the water boiled rapidly because there was so much of it. Enmeshed in cloudy veils my mother and father began acting out an unpleasant charade. At a distance from one another, circling, never coming together, they paced about the now-invisible parquet with faces changing a mile a minute. My father's cheeks went all lumpy, his forehead accordioned. My mother's nose seem made from clay and her hair blew and crackled about her temples like the uncut weeds and grasses in the vacant lot by the corner, dead by still rooted.

By the time the steam was gone we were all bundled up and packed into the family car, our new '49 Ford, speeding through the night and out of the city. I heard train whistles and watched telephone poles looming and shrinking against the blackness. I was sure I had done nothing wrong, yet my parents were making me sit in the backseat instead of upfront between them, though there was plenty of room between them. And their faces looked odd. Like other adults in the market or on the streets, they had become strangers. Their eyes didn't know me and I could no longer recognize them.

That night we drove to my grand parents' house, where I was to stay for the next several weeks. My father and mother, I was told, had a trip to take. Years later I learned their "trip" was a trial separation to contemplate a divorce that never happened. Years later I was told there had been no boiling water, no steam. Yet that is how I remember it, and surely at some level what took place.