Page 41 - WTP VOl. X #3

As they went downstairs Cousin Andy cleared his throat and Jason looked up at him, and he looked back and smiled.
“H
“You have a wonderful mother,” he said. “Do you ap- preciate that?”
Jason nodded, a little fearful, and grateful to his mother, whom he loved with almost tearful gratitude.
“Good,” said Cousin Andy, and laughed.
XI.
When Jason was eighteen, he noticed the frayed green book for the first time since childhood. He pulled it from his shelf, in wonder that Andy had been gone so long. He didn’t remember reading it any time after the funeral, but he remembered those pictures very well... He flipped the book open and smiled at tiny distant Orion, in the far intercept of the arrow’s proposed arc, long and low. Poor Cousin Andy! Poor Actaeon! There was Diana, way up in the corner, more naked than he had remembered. No wonder she was mad. Poor Cousin Andy. He didn’t even have to look at the hymnal, just belted those songs out like there was no tomorrow, joyful joyful! He hadn’t seen him on the way home. When he’d all but forgotten him, his mother told him that Cousin Andy had been found dead in his tiny Vermont home. The words “found dead” left him uneasy. He waited to feel loss, but never did. He hadn’t been at Easter or Christmas the next year.... Jason paused with a finger under the next page. He pictured him sitting crookedly at his kitchen table, staring past a cold plate of eggs. A pair of Mormon missionaries had given up knocking and turned to leave when one of them spied him through the window. It was easy to picture his eyes fixed in death, so strangely fixed as they were in his memory. Jason looked down, and, almost surprised at the book in his hands, snapped it shut. He breathed out the rising fumes of disgust and looked around his room. There were his lead sol- diers in regiment; a little carved wooden horse; and his trumpet. Sudden tears sprang almost to his eyes and his heart trembled. He swallowed, the first pang passed, and he felt subsiding in his heart an unan- swered sorrow for his father’s cousin.
Host’s short stories have appeared in OyeDrum Magazine and The Decadent Review. In 2021 she won First Prize for Fiction at the Westmoreland Arts and Heritage Festival.
showing him poker, the green book, and the yellow meal that secreted from the corner of his mouth, and for playing the trumpet, in his bedroom, apart, where he could have showed him anything, and (he shuddered) left him a pale sickly ‘little boy, little boy’ with haunted eyes and a quavering voice.”
e hated Cousin Andy for
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