37. Family Members

The wind in the night on the grass in front of the porch lit by candles. Cicadas chirped and life rustled in the woods and inside Steven's brain went off a delightful spectrum of fireworks.

"You know, a horrible man and the devil may be layered over one another," said Steven's father on the porch, "and the difference," he spat "negligible."

"Negligible at best, paw!" Said Steven.

"Shut up, boy." Father chucked a stone at Steven's head, prompting the errant youngster to resume looking forward again.

In the distance Steven had a brother. He was out in those dark woods, presumably lost. Further into the thick of the dark and into the lights of the city Steven had another brother who by all accounts had died. In outer space dwelt Steven's celestial father.

Steven remembered his mother, she had taken short leave to pursue a flimsy string of clues out in the American Southwest leading to her brother, Axelrod Buttertable, Steven's uncle.

He recalled:

Walking through the dilapidated house, shit and dust and objects askance. He had heard his mother's buzzer, he had been summoned into her spic-and-span office. The lacquered cherry wood door was a strange protrusive entity in the dusty house, and inside her desk sat at the plexus of the triangulated room, two imposing bookshelves reached out to you like wooden arms--lined with dusted books and pictures of her with many dignitaries: King George the 3rd, Napoleon, Richard Nixon and Kissinger Nixon (which is strange since the Union was yet to enter the War of Northern Aggression.)

She beckoned him to sit. She was in a nice suit.

"Steven." She said.

"Mother." He said, sitting down.

"I am leaving. I recieved this brown envelope in the mail yesterday."

Pause.

"And I would have received it and immediately notified you of its ramifications if my mail-clerk weren't as incompetent as a set of Firestone tires on a ford explorer." She said, she paused, her gaze turned up and to the right above Steven's head. "full of hip-hop artists."

The Firestone/Ford controversy was about 250 years ahead of Steven's time sitting across from his mother. Naturally, he was silent.

"The envelope has promising leads, I have to go." And with that she stood up, two identical suitcases in hand. "I will call you." She said. "Sweetie." She said that in such a way as to indicate it was the first time those words had ever left her mouth. (And the thought; her brain.)

"She wrote you a letter." Said father, on the porch.

Steven kept staring out into the woods. "I don't want to read it." He said.

"I think you should, boy."

"Why?"

"She found Axelrod Buttertable."