The Veracity

A Prologue

Great. It's morning again. His green eyes had opened to the pull string hanging from the light that was installed on the ceiling of the apartment just a week ago. His neck ached and his back felt as if it needed to be broken in order to be repaired. He hadn't gotten use to sleeping on a wooden floor just as yet and pretty much feared that he wouldn't be getting used to it any time soon. Darn it. He needed to invest in one of those inflatable beds.

Reluctantly, he got up and slipped on a pair of Lee Havoc jeans that was left lying on the floor from the other night, next to an old tattered novella, For the love of Roses. They were a bit snug around the hips, so he didn't like wearing them. Living on a small island, where masculinity wasn't very three dimensional, wearing anything the was too from removed from a medium size golf shirt and a pair of standard blue Dickies work pants could get folk thinking you might be playing for the other team. However, that was the only pair of pants he had left. His plan was to initially stock his apartment lightly so he only brought enough with him for about ten days and maybe he'd wash every week what he need, well, the first week had gone by since he moved out and he wasn't yet in the mood of doing his own laundry. He figured there was at least three weeks of clothing left in his luggage in storage so there was still some time before he'd have to stress about totting some pillowcase of dirty clothes behind him to the laundromat.

Elwood Callaway had just moved into his own apartment, which was just recently built close to the Summer Haven sub-division next to the Zion South Beach Baptist church deep on the southern end of New Providence island. Moving from the air-conditioned house with a sunken living room and indoor pool in Sans Souci, to a hot, unfurnished apartment in the "no-where" part of the island was definitely not easy, and well, the apartment wasn't much to talk about. It was just newly built and practically everything was made of wood, wooden walls, wooden floors and wooden ceilings. Wooden everything. Just shiny, brown, polished wood. Even the toilet was made from wood.

The bathroom doesn't even have running water, Elwood thought standing in front of the mirror rubbing his eyes then taking a glance at his bungee watch. The watch came from a souvenir shop at an airport in Japan. He had spent Christmas vacation there using his rich father's credit card. Now he would no longer have that choice, he had moved from home and essentially cut off any economic ties with his parents. It was his own decision to move out and build a life of his own, not one built by his father. At first it seemed crazy to him. Who would refuse the lavish life of being the son of a multimillionaire? For some reason, it just felt right and everything in his life felt – wrong. Everything he'd ever achieved, any competition he'd ever won, every recognition he had ever gotten was all because of who his father was. Up until this time in his life all he was, was an extension of his father. Elwood Callaway did not exist, only the son of Elmont Woodson James Francisco IV existed, and in all his glory he still wasn't good enough to bear his father's last name. He had to break away, for he feared he'd never know what it felt like to be alive.

Though he lived in the capital, Elwood still choose to live the "island life". Every morning he went out and got buckets of water from a public faucet that he'd need to use throughout the day. Luckily for him, it was not a far walk away. From his apartment, it was about a five-minute walk to the literal end of the island, to where the sea met the sea. In fact, he thought that he might even be starting to enjoy the walk. That decision could be partially influenced by the fact that he had to pass a mandarin orange tree along the way and would always fill one of his buckets to the rim with the tasty fruits. Fruit trees on the beach that wasn't sea grapes or cocoa plums was a rare sight to see. However, this wasn't the family islands, this was Nassau, to see any type of fruit tree at all that wasn't behind the protective barrier of a fence that surrounded someone's backyard, was amazing enough. The first thought to cross his mind was that tree was inflicted with some type of Obeah (the Bahamian form of voodoo), spell. Seeing its smooth virtually flawless almond colored bark, the sea green of the leaves glisten in the straying beams of the immature sun while blowing a soft smell of citrus in the air even though there wasn't the slightest bit of sea breeze, made it all the more, almost the eerie and magical thing he had ever seen. And the oranges – they were the brightest neon orange he had ever seen. He had learnt from first grade that bright colors were always a warning sign, but the magic spell of the oranges were too much to resist and as if he was hypnotized by its mystical allure, he picked off one of the brilliant fruits, ignored the danger warnings and peeled in. Since the first taste of the seemingly forbidden fruit didn't kill him, he figured there's no harm in going back for more. Once is never enough.