Bloomed

By Damien W. Green

When 34-year-old William Cooper returns to his grandparents' farm for the first time in 20 years, a farm he remembers from his youth as "a magical place that stood as a cornerstone in my life," it is not only a place to bury his father but also to reawaken his lost self.William falls back in time to when he and his brother Joseph visited the farm for the last time, where he faces the one ghost that has haunted him for the last 20 years

• Language: English
• Publisher: Damien W. Green
• Release date: Jan 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310316050

Damien W. Green

I am part of The Burr Oak Farms Art Collective. A local and very small group of farmers who are also musicians, painters, poets, writers, wishers and hopers. I am a fourth generation farmer and poet who lives in southern Minnesota. I write flash fiction, short stories and poetry as well as manage a puppet theatre.I can be reached by carrier pigeon or via email: [e-mail]

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Bloomed

Damien W. Green

©Damien W. Green

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

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For my mother, Rosemary.

Chapter 1

Autumn is a fleeting moment, a moment when time withers and light decays, a moment when life’s treasures are buried, left to spoil and be opened no more. It is a moment when life and death lie intertwined like fleeting lovers beneath a blanket of dying leaves before the aching promise of time awakens the frozen reality of winter that will steal them both and leave only the creaking sound of a door. It is a door that opens slowly to memories that, like shadows, can change their shape according to the light in which they are seen and the darkness from which they are cast. Memories are like dead echoes and fallen leaves, they change color with time and their songs are all out of tune. At times memories appear as pale, distorted angels with fluttering, brooding wings, while in other moments, through another arc of light, they appear as aching, fragile monsters that frighten only small children. And while the delicate heart seeks what pleases it—and what pleases it most is the thought of returning to the womb, to that impossible comfort, the silent darkness of that warm place—the soul, that weary traveler through our many lives, seeks the light that will annihilate the darkness and burn those memories away in its desire to find the tiny ember of truth, which flickers and glows like a smoldering fuse.

Heavy fog hangs suspended just above the green grass of the yard. It is dawn, yet not fully light, and the wounded sky is a purple bruise, swollen with brooding, meaty clouds. Mist soaks through the trees; soaks through the sky like gray sweat. Meanwhile, far beneath the bruised, sweating sky sits William Cooper looking out of his grandparent’s picture window trying to find his father’s ghost out there among the empty corncribs, broken fences and decrepit buildings. He’s certain that a ghost would feel at home out here in a world where everything is barely breathing, only half alive and waiting for death or the junkyard.

Of course, out here, he thinks, everything is dying now, and the promises of children have withered and waned and turn aimlessly like a broken weathervane. Even the barns are lonely, and the scarecrows are useless. Broken and weathered, they frighten only the shadows of crows.

It seems, in fact, to be inviting death to come—to come and remove life’s afflictions. But what of the ghost’s physical appearance? he thinks. Will I recognize my father, or has the ghost now become a part of the mist, the fog, the sky, the pines and the black dirt of the earth? Do the dead house themselves within the material shells of living things?

If the ghost has become all of these things does this mean that every time he steps outside William will be haunted by his father? What about you, Father? Do blessings come to you even while dreaming in death’s bed? Or are these memories left with us to carve you out again from deathless shadows?

Autumn is not a good time to die. Everything else is dying too, and so death becomes intertwined and lost in the landscape. It becomes difficult to tell a person’s death from that of crops, flowerbeds and summer itself. Even in winter a death will stand out by its darkness—its blackness against the white snow. It will be significant because winter celebrates the birth of Christ, and among the songs, the tinsel, and the star on the tree, death seems so out of place.

Spring and summer have enough room for death. They make death feel significant because it dares interrupt the renewal of life and the celebration of life and love. Yes, who has not felt the sweet sting of unrequited or unspoken love through an endless summer? Only autumn seems to cover death in colored leaves and a harvest moon. Autumn wants to die alone, and perhaps William’s father wanted to die beneath its blanket of faded leaves—quiet, unassuming and alone like the lonesome sound of a train whistle that calls from faraway, as if to let you know that it is alone and must be alone but yet, it begs to be heard and remembered.

While his father was dying from the cancer that poisoned him slowly but with skilled certainty, William did not go out to Oregon to see him. He spoke with his father several times over the telephone while the short battle raged, but William would not go to see him face to face. He could sense the severity of the illness in his father’s voice, which over time grew to nothing but a hoarse, wasted whisper. William felt as though he didn’t really know his father as a living man for he had always existed ghostlike from the time he left and fled west. Will was five then; his brother Joseph was one and, although Will had gone to see his father in Oregon a few times and his father had returned a few times to see his brother and him, he had only known his father as a child knows his father. He never knew him as a young man comes know his father, and as an adult comes to see his father as a man. So in not truly knowing his father while he was alive, William wondered how he could know his father’s death. It is meaningless to see a man die when you have rarely seen him live.

Will has recreated his father a thousand times since his death, which makes him wonder why we trouble ourselves with burying the dead when we only resurrect them again and again? Is it because death, like life itself has no firm purpose and it is simply an experience, so that even as the living make demands on the memory of the dead, so too the dead desire thoughts from the living? The dead are reckless and they disfigure themselves, flinging tiny arrows to keep their distance. There are still moments when their paper wings fly, caught up in a sailor’s wind—that blue breeze. Yet, still, we carve them out again and again from those deathless shadows of memory, in search of that evergreen look of mercy, but always lost in the sea of night’s madness flooding like tides of trembling stars. Repentance spills like dawn’s first flicker. Wide eyes blur and become an echo. The song of mourning rings deeply, while shadows dance eternally, always haunting.

It has been twenty years, he thinks to himself, "since I was last here. This once magical place that stood as a cornerstone in my life—a place that turned despair into joy, that could quiet pain and anger—a place where I could empty myself, my young self with my young, yet sometimes older thoughts and feelings. This place that housed my other life and my other self—my life away from home that was always so much better than home. My spirit ran through those woods, soared through those trees and dove into the creek and never once had to hold its breath. Never once did my spirit tell me to slow down, to not cry, to not talk so loudly, to not make a mess. This place held several lives, old and new. Several spirits wandered freely—the young married couple building their home and starting a family, those young lovers merging into one another, seed and milky substance from which life forms. The spirits of young parents and now familiar lovers, of father and mother, yes those spirits are still here. They still breathe in the voices of my grandparents.

Branches of wild oak reach for a sky they will never touch, reach for dreams beyond shadows. Sometimes they find beauty and wings, and sometimes harm and hurt, for life bruises like all fruit that falls to the ground. And Will remembers a time, as summer was wilting beneath its own August heat, when he and his brother came out to this place for the last time. He knows now what he could have never realized then—that one moment in an entire lifetime of moments can be the bridge from when a boy believes that things will never change. When he believes that life will consist of timeless, vague afternoons and that the days will grow weary and fall into night’s arms before you ever think of being tired. And just on the other side is the realization that life will never be what it once was, that the promises once held will fall from those boy’s fragile hands and be picked up again by different hands—hands that have seen not only the lights of life but the shadows of death. He knows that he must walk among the shadows now as he once walked among the light. And much later, it all seems strange that the boy that was lost, and lost only for a moment, will spend a lifetime searching for him and oftentimes, as it is for many lost boys who become lost men, the boy will never be found again.

Looking out over the landscape, William stands up and draws a deep breath and wonders if maybe he could open the caged door and take a few steps back into that world of unspoiled freedom—that world of twenty years past. Would he recognize himself as that blonde-haired boy who, at that time, was on the cusp of blooming into a young man? Would he be able to recognize that boy who still believed he could fly, soar, hear the wind whisper through the trees, and speak to the sun? Would he recognize that boy who believed in the wild miles of reckless adventure the books he had read promised him—that boy who believed the most violent thunderstorms were just hands full of rain and the raging lightening was merely the ghost of electricity? Although the world, even then, was fragile, wrought with danger and sometimes terrifying, he always believed that he would be delivered from