MY YELLOW FURY: Part III

Part III: The Smoke Shack

At first I thought I knew the yellow truck, as some vestige of my childhood but I realized it was no toy that I had played with. Even though I couldn’t remember the truck, somehow its brilliant yellow and black rubber wheels were enshrined in my mind. Along with a familiarity of the toy, I soon abhorred its mere arrival.

Despite my annoyance at the truck, it served as a distraction for Cosmo. The dog lunged at the yellow truck, which drove itself away from his assault and took off toward the open garage door at the side of the house. Cosmo made chase at the truck and disappeared into the garage as the door slam shut behind. He howled within as I lowered myself from the oak. To my dismay, the woman who had fallen at the trunk had vanished beneath me.

Incensed, I looked up at my childhood bedroom, which still flickered with the light from a single candle. As I was about to run across the moonlit lawn to the house, I noticed a new light now at my side. It was the light from a cigar, whose end burned with a single ember.

The cinder smoldered within the darkened window of my Father’s smoke shack; once only reserved for his silent smoking and secret thinking. It was no place for his small son.

Tempted, I ran at the lean-to shelter, bursting through the creaking door. The room was black before me. The blackness curled around me, inching over my skin and drawing out my memories. Within this blackness, his cigar fire suspended freely. I could hear his breath taking deep drags, moving the cigar light in the room like a lazy firefly.

“She should’ve known what was best for her… for her… for her…” he said. His voice crept along the floor and up the walls. It came from all directions, surrounding me in echoes. “Couldn’t let things be… things be… things be…”

Did he know I was no longer a child? Did he know how perfectly my hands could fit around his neck?

I lunged at the dangling cigar but the darkness was suddenly swept before me into the bright day of a clean, blue sky. The house, the yard and the old oak evaporated around me. The curtain of the smoke shack was cast away leaving me by a cliff-side with a large chasm beneath my feet. Although I could still smell the smoke from my Father’s cigar, the entire scene had been lifted from my eyes by whatever force that brought me to my childhood home.