The Island in the Back Yard and Memory Lane: A Strange Occurrence

The Island in the Backyard and Memory Lane

He wore a black suit because, as his mother told him, black suits were for mourning. The black luxury car, bought with the leftover money that his grandfather had given him for college, was in was not part of the morning process and his drivers black attire was not either, but it suited the occasion.

As the middle-aged man thought about little coincidences, such as those, the black car made a right hand turn onto a black street with houses that soaked up the sunlight, save the old Victorian house. The house that reflected the sunlight, the odd one out of the rest, was the house that he called home for most of his childhood. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath as his driver and he approached the house.

Home for him as a child was strange and he didn't understand it until he started to accumulate years of age like trophies. Loud noises constantly came from his parents' room. Words, that his parents told him to never say, were said more often than not. The small boy that lived in that house, the now middle-aged man, wondered why his father was always so adamant about staying at the house they were in.

There were times when a plate was moved to the other side of the table, a fork suddenly on the floor, a door slowly creaking to a close, or even a figure in the door way; but who can say that any of it really happened? As the middle-aged man thought about it, his mother wasn't always in the best mental state when his father was around. He always heard his mother plead, "We should not stay here any longer," but his father never heard her cries through the alcohol in his brain or didn't care enough to listen to them.

He might not have loved what happened in the house, but the boy loved the tattered white house itself. It was next to his school and several others that he assumed his friends went to (He always saw school kids with the same uniform as his friends around the area), it had a backyard that he would sometimes get lost in, trees that he could only dream of climbing, and an island. It, in truth, may not have been an island; but that is what he saw it as. A creek surrounded it or, a better way to describe it he thought, looped around it like a snake.

He was no longer allowed to go over to the island because of a decree his father had made randomly at the start of that summer, but when the boy was lonely and wanted to play with his friends, he would go and cross the moat that surrounded it.

During the months before the disappearance of his father, the boy had visited the island a lot; but he only went when his father showed signs of going into his fits of violence. When he could hear the rings of breaking glass against the wall, or the cries of his mom, or his father shouting, "Where did you go boy? I have a present for you!", he knew it was time to leave because that meant the "presents" were coming. The boy did not like the presents his father gave him, and his mom had to hide the aftermath of those presents from the teachers and other kids at school. Unfortunately, make-up on a boy, in that time did not attract the kind of attention one would normally want. So, to avoid that, he would escape to his island.

The boy had never seen snow before. As he imagined the fluffy white flakes, crimson red and fire orange leaves danced and swayed around him as they fell to the ground slowly. As if the leaves were trying to stay around longer than they should.

The oak trees that surrounded the boy were not more than thirty feet tall, but to him they went on for miles, scraping the sky. As he looked up it seemed as though he could climb those trees and reach Heaven. His concept of Heaven was not as developed as it would be in the years of hardship that followed him, but for now all he needed to know then was that some kind of place like that had a chance to exist.

The thought of trying to reach Heaven came and left in one instant; the sun was too bright to ponder such things for too long. The boy, instead of looking at the tops of the trees, now had his eyes closed and was listening to the trees sing. The song was beautiful, but as an old man he realized that it was only beautiful when his friends were there.