He knew from the moment, a time neither here nor there, he fell in love with her absence, he was going to kill her by that way; of the many ways; by remembering her.



August became the reason for numerous things in life. It rang thick of hot and endless nights on cheap store-bought wine and silent walks on cooler sands. August was reminiscent of twisting and turning heavy comforters into sweaty fits of restlessness. Life was beginning again, but his convictions about beginnings were the same as his thoughts on endings. They brought each other about, wove the threads together as if sister seamstresses at both entrances of a maze. Life had certainly begun, and the previous notion of life had ended. The few signets of a childhood long unwanted remained in the back of seldom opened thoughts. Thick wisps of smoke propelled upward from his mouth as he took a long drag, exhaling decidedly. The rock-wall image of his mother with a stick of dynamite in her mouth forced his melancholy smile to exist unhindered by that mental contempt.


Tim loved his mother. She was dearest to him in all manners to the certain way, of lessons and lectures, thinking he knew best where he could put her. He didn’t know how she would react to it, but it was the almost-certainty of his love for her that made him do what he did. Tim’s father had always been more level-headed, seeing there the path to get on the beach. To drink the wine and bury those close moments of maternity, Tim had to follow those steps so warned against by his mother. He forced himself to make these decisions because he wanted to be let down. Tim often found himself wishing the unglory of forgetfulness, of having never known his mother’s struggles. In his mind he was abandoning her, even if all children are meant to leave in a successful haze of triumph. She could not understand his decisions. She had to weep. She had to pass. He took another draw from his cigarette, his hand falling beside the shadow.



He rested his hand longingly on the top banister of his lookout, staring out towards a vast and malignant nature. Growing, moving, and changing. His lengthy vista took up enough relative space to claim a festooned beach on the latter part of the Point Culler. Tim reveled in his solidarity. He enjoyed the ever-boding silence. Tim snubbed his cigarette on the railing and tossed the butt into a plastic Folgers container nearby. He exhaled the last of his serenity, knowing it was his last, knowing he would have to go buy more. He promised himself he would quit. He tried to remember if the corner-store was open on Friday nights after six in the evening, but he couldn’t.


He grasped for the urn at his feet and lifted it with care. The surfaces had been glazed to a fine smooth texture, the kind which looked ugly with smudges and greasy pock-marked fingertips. He turned it over in his hands, reading the epitaph and mulling it over. Tim zoned his eyes into the copper sun, remembering the eulogy he delivered on that hot August night to the audience in the hall of trapped shadows.







***

“To a mother!” He shouted enthusiastically, a bottle of whiskey dancing in his hand like a set of jingling keys. “To this mother, this ‘perfect’ mother, this hallowed-be-thy-name, what was it... Right, to this alcoholic mother!”

“God rest her dreary soul, let her sleep for several eternities over. But uh, remember kids,” He started to wheeze uncontrollably, “To look under her bed,” Tim uttered a salivated, slurred laugh, “For the empty bottles of rum and gin!”


He took a long swig from the glass bottle in his hand. He threw it against the empty pews and watched it shatter into a thousand tiny pieces as it hit the ceramic tiles. The impact echoing through the empty tall ceiling and deserted corridors was real. He ripped the urn of ashes from the altar below the podium and left to cash his inheritance at the bank.






***

The house was a dream. Tim realized at the end of twelfth grade that someday he wanted to become an author. He was content with the idea of living off the more than generous inheritance. Like beginnings, however, it was only a means to an end and an ending to that means. Life had to be more than becoming content with itself; there had to be conflict and unnecessary violence to balance the scales. Writing books seemed the most legal way to get away with that. Writing books was letting him get away with being the cocky ‘new guy’ and loving every second of killing off characters that looked like family members.



There was no thinking about it. It was automatic. Nature over nurture.


He opened the urn, and without previous convictions of August days, seldom forgotten and always falling back down, he emptied it’s contents. He let the ashes drift meaningfully upon the ancient coastal breeze, psithurism through balsam fir and black spruce upon the wind felt by awoken eyelids. Hurricanes lapsed these shores in the days, the sound a thought of open-ended laceration on the rock faces farther down the road.

Sometimes, Tim liked to walk along the high slopes remembered in that childhood, his sundered armor flailing everywhere around him. He had secrets tucked back behind his brain, there the smell of churning evolution and the sentimental girl touching his heart from beyond the grave. The taste of that bottle he found under his mother’s bed just before he found her body. The tickle of pepper-jack tears as they fell from his darkened mirrors onto her shining, wooden reality.


And those ashes would remain despite Hurricanes and wind storms and bleeding hearts. A break of tradition, a slip behind the back-street bar. Snow slipping endlessly beneath beer goggles of the times--the times as they were and the times as they were always going to be.


Tim took his jingling keys rom their quaint hook. He left his doors unlocked and rode into town for more smokes.