He wasn't a very good father. I remember fetching him his slippers, they always smelled of some nameless, empty disease, the same as the feeling I'd get when I looked into his eyes. Never a man of science, he had married my mother, a real woman, and she used to sing us to sleep every night with tunes she had made up as a girl. She tried to teach me the violin but we couldn't afford to have it strung, soon I grew tired of practicing on a silent skeleton, and so did my mother I guess. She didn't seem to mind when they took her away, the tune she hummed was bright, and my father sat me down and spoke his first words to me of my life, I don't remember what he said now, but I remember his hand on my shoulder.

Never a man of science, he didn't take to drinking like any other asylum husband would have. This was around the time when a girl from school taught me how to skip stones, I used to make wishes on them; usually I would wish for a dog. My Aunt drove up from Texas that first Christmas after Mom left, she cooked us a turkey dinner, bought sack of candy for me and new slippers for my father, but after she left he cut them into ribbons and for the next week we ate turkey and slipper sandwiches, my father muttering, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it.".

Summer camp was a blast that year, an older boy, Jean, had found the key to the camp's gun collection, and we spent many an afternoon shooting cats in the nearby town. I drove through that area the other day, it's all graffiti and cheap concrete now, and the arcade had been burned to the ground. I thought of asking one of the girls working at the diner about that, but she was just a baby– pregnant, yes, but still too young to remember anything substantial. I went to a Christmas pageant down at the school there the other night– I'd just seen the posters, I didn't know any of the kids in it, but I knew the story, it was "The Three Little Pigs". I guess "The Christmas Story" is politically incorrect now. I always thought "The Christmas Story" was boring anyway, and besides, the kid who played the big bad wolf was a comedic genius, I think he could go far in life, if he stays off the drugs.

Never a man of science, my father smoked cigarettes; more after my mother had left, and in the mornings the hall bathroom used to be a mess of steam and smoke, it would waft through the house and into the ends of my dreams. I never asked my father what he did for a living, this seems a little peculiar to me now as most children seem to be fascinated with their parent's occupations. I never had children myself. The other day I turned on the news, and countries I had never known existed were at war with each other: maybe one of them was mine. I never got involved in the schoolyard fights, sometimes I would daydream about violence, but I always thought I would just end up embarrassing myself. I'm still as shy as I was back then. I don't even act anymore, I used to love that. I was in all the school plays, and I used to audition for other things: commercials; sometimes TV–but after college I found myself fading away from things like that. I probably learned my withdrawal from my father. He was a recluse by nature, without friends or any social connections aside from the man who used to bring our groceries by, who would end up sitting alongside my father on the front porch for hours, smoking, neither one of them saying a word.

Confused by my father's silence, I used to practice. The longest I ever went as a child without speaking was eleven days, over the winter break when I was nine. You learn a lot by locking yourself into silence. When I stopped trying to express the things in my head, I suddenly became acquainted with myself through all of the things I chose not to say. It was like spending two weeks in a vacuum; I never wanted to forfeit my muteness, during those weeks I felt closer to him than at any other time in my life.

I broke the silence for a fire. I have little memory of what happened, I remember first seeing flames, then finding my voice, and finally yelling for my mother. I can't remember if she had already gone back then. The next memory I have after that is of Valentine's Day, specifically a girl named Jenny. She told me she loved me that winter. The only girl I ever said I love you to I met much later, and she didn't hear me when I said it; I've always been soft spoken. Perhaps I'm louder now, I have no way of knowing. I don't think I've spoken in at least a month or two– the way the world runs now, everything is mechanical, automatic; you never need to speak, you barely need to exist as an entity at all.

Yesterday I made up a story for a movie in my head. It was about a man who designed curtains, who was hired by the devil to redecorate the windows of the library in Hell. I'm not sure how it would end, I got stuck on trying to think of a name for the curtain designer.

I'm thinking about buying a journal, one with a lot of pages– maybe I could write for an hour a day, until the whole story was out, even the parts I haven't made up yet. I could ask someone else to name the curtain salesman for me: maybe he doesn't even need a name– I've read stories where certain characters never have names. That little boy who played the Big Bad Wolf could be the devil– and the school children could perform it in the spring concert! Then he would need a name. As a child I kept a journal, and I filled it with words, but I lost it one year at summer camp and I never bought another one after that; never went back to summer camp, either– instead I got a job working as a grocery store delivery boy. A lot of people payed me in cigarettes; I didn't like to smoke, but I had a girlfriend and she smoked more than my father did. They sort of developed a rapport that summer, the girl and my father, but then school started back up and she stopped hanging around: said I was too quiet. She always came out to see me in the school plays though, I always looked for her face in the crowd. Hers and my father's. The difference was that his was never there.

I used to talk to this tree in my backyard, I didn't give it a name but that could just be my memory, I probably did name it. I remember a lightning storm one summer: it was so hot that year that one morning my father cooked our breakfasts on the hood of the car, just because he could, while my mother and I knelt in front of the electric fan in the kitchen, side by side, eating cereal with cold milk and drinking sweet tea out of glasses full of ice cubes– my mother said she wasn't eating anything that wasn't cooked on a proper appliance. So my father was tanned but my mother was pale and I was in between, and the lightning struck the tree and turned it into a stranger: it grew so much older than me that day, and after that I could only nod my head to it as I passed by, showing my respect; my reverence; my awe and appreciation of it's startling new maturity. You might think that that's strange, even for a small child, but, never a man of science, one time I saw my father nodding to it, too.