The World You See, the World That Is…

An Exercise in Short Fiction

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I must confess that I haven’t taken a serious picture in years, not until now; not since my college days, some twenty years back. I moved out West shortly after graduation to escape the depressing sameness here in the heartland, but also to get away from the horrible memories. My father killed my mother when I was only five, right in front of me; went to prison for life because of it. I was placed in a foster home for a time before my aunt Ida could be cleared to take me in. She wasn’t really my aunt, not by blood anyway; just a lady my biological uncle had been married to for a few years before he died. Since I was an only child and didn’t have any family to speak of, Ida was the one to bear the burden, as it were.

Not that she had any reservations against it. Of all the people I could claim as relatives, she was, without a doubt, the most together, mentally speaking. Father was an unstable, violent psychopath; mother was a self-involved narcissist. Everyone else was either a loser or completely incapable of caring for a newly orphaned child who had suddenly gone mute. I never answered the question of whether she, meaning my mother, deserved to get knifed the way she did, but, by all accounts, they deserved each other. So I suppose a traumatic death was inevitable for at least one of them. I would have…