Thalo Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

early childhood, those years between three and nine when it seemed his father’s displeasure for him began—though there are countless other snapshots with varying degrees of lesser quality—stand out to him as particularly significant. They are the clearest in his mind, and at times, he has to convince himself that they are not real, not actually happening to him at that precise moment. They are that vivid.
    In order of their occurrence, the first such flashcard is of his head held down by a large white mitten while descending into a long gray tunnel. The second is a kitchen table covered in crayon markings—blue letters, z mostly, which he always pronounced zee , and his father always corrected him, zed . Combined with that memory is a long and curving line of red, starting to blister and bubble along the length of his inner forearm. The pain of it and the picture in his head of crayon markings on the kitchen table, come to him with pinprick lucidity, and they bring back the physical pain of that moment with utter perfection. He swears, when he sees that table and those crayon smears, that he can feel the unbearable itchy burning sting under the skin of his arm.
    The last memory, the least clear and most perplexing of the set, is a vision of water beyond the black steel bars of a gate that stands closed before him. Looking beyond, Sebastion sees, frozen forever in his mind’s eye, a boat kicking up white furls of wake and moving towards the farthest edge of the water’s body. A man stands on the back deck of the craft facing him, his arm raised, his expression flat and empty.
     
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    When Sebastion was four, he was diagnosed with a rather unique condition. Though to say diagnosed like that might make it seem that Sebastion would be dying. After a long and inevitable period of suffering, he would fade away and expire at an early age, with his mother and dad outliving him in a way most parents dread. Or, to say it like that, diagnosed, would be to suggest a long life of endless suffering, of daily injections or painful treatments, and in the end, that he would never be a normal kid with a normal life.
    But that wasn’t the case. None of it. Except perhaps the part about normalcy.
    Sebastion’s condition was, as he saw it, and as his mother always told him, rather the opposite of both the early-death and the long-drawn-out-suffering kinds of conditions. This condition was, according to Sadie, a blessing from God.
     
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    Sadie stood in the kitchen-half of the kitchen-dining room split while soup steamed on the top of the stove behind her. She was making lunch while Oliver sat at the giant oak desk in the back study and ran through the family bills. Her husband’s head, Sadie thought, hung like it was broken when she had peered in on him and asked what would be suitable for lunch. He looked like the numbers would never settle out properly. But she didn’t say anything about the stack of papers he was staring at, had started not to and would only get less and less apt to do so.
    The Redfield home, save for the cottage on scattered summer weekends, was the only home they ever lived in together as a family configuration. It was the root of nearly every one of Sebastion’s childhood memories. It was one of those ‘modern’ homes built in the nineteen-sixties when designers started to realize just how much time was spent in the kitchen, and what a social event food preparation had become. Dinner gatherings with friends and neighbors were catching on, as were fondue parties where everyone wanted to have a look in the kitchen to see what was cooking on the stove top. Certainly that’s what architects must have decided, must have told each other in weekly meetings of the time. But in reality, behind all that nonsense, was the women’s movement that wanted to pull wives out from behind the closed door of the kitchen and bring them closer to a sense of belonging, closer to a sense of equality—closer,