'Nature rarer uses yellow
than another hue.'
Emily Dickinson
The Rarer Hue
It wasn't until he became the man of the house that Peter Bishop shook hands with fear. It had an admirable grip, however bitterly unrelenting. That morning a school bus had been boarded with the approving universe looking down upon a youth who would later emerge from that yellow-tinged safety remarkably aged. In the office of a stern principal practicing requisite comfort, his father's crime was presented; vague and cautiously worded. And a boy put away his toys and shrugged on the mantle of a new existence that did not fit.
With a shifting stance and the silence of the ill-prepared, Peter waited awkwardly in a crying woman's bedroom. There the freshly christened head of the household patted hitching shoulders with dismal inefficiency. The flow erupted from a wound that could not be bound by the thin wrap of a child's touch. In the span of a day, the heavy shaded room took on an abandoned facade, as though no one had ever loved in this space. Eventually the corn-kernel pills littering the counter brought rest even as the chemicals stifled life; a temporary solution to an irresolvable problem. A dead woman served crushed pancakes and an aproned zombie poured spoiled milk. He stopped watching horror movies.
Of the many words led to the gallows, 'father' was first to be strung up. The tight noose had lasted seventeen days, until he allowed two syllables to meet once more, the familial designation finding air on a cloudy Thursday. After her phenomenal breakdown the word was wholly slaughtered. But the vacancy was a waiting grave so his mother made attempts to seat Peter at the hallowed end of the table, the place of authority. Sliding the straw place mat with its stacked china resolutely to the left, he'd take his meal across from a woman seeking to submit. To someone. To anyone.
In truth, his mother's eventual tries at dating were welcomed. Stumbling as they were, distractions doused her sobs, interest stealing inches from her medication-numbed mass of despair. But there was something in each of those early suitors that brought about her swift rejection. It took his inexperienced mind some time to register the words she used to describe the reason they were unfit. A wave of hair, a depth of voice, an unacceptable height. Intelligence was the most unforgivable trait. Each time, she focused on a feature reminiscent of the institutionalized man and tossed the men away for the perceived flaw. This brought about a search for something starkly different. And the knotty string of pointless paramours was fixed at one end by abusers and the other by stalkers. They'd had to move twice to escape her poor choices. In the end, she settled on a blond of quick commitment and varying tempers. Surely, the man's intellect would intimidate no one.
The darker shades lightened with the disposition of a woman occupied with dawning attention. Pinker cheeks overcame the parchment pallor as a stranger took position at the table's end and thanked God with bowed head for the son he always wanted. It was the first and only time such an endearment would be used. And home became anywhere that wasn't the three-occupant dwelling that hid an attic full of awards earned by the criminally insane.
The end of the first year saw a second man clapped in irons. The crime's only evidence lay in the deep tissue bruising of a habitually trembling woman. This precipitated yet another move, though she maintained a staunch radius to the institution they never visited. The purple around her eye faded to a sickly pale blemish that wouldn't quite vanish. A girlfriend noted his mother's constant melancholy, which Peter blamed on the lighting. This was the last girl he ever brought home because the giggling teen's whispers gifted his mother a reputation for drunkenness unearned. Still her pills were plentiful, no matter how many times he'd stashed and destroyed them. In time, he found self-ingesting the yellow tablets as good a way to deprive her of them. The chemical dulling of his nerves coincided with an opening of eyes; outside influences brought within create possibilities without. With the beginning phase of his destructive cycle, he found a new mantle with which he was at ease; solitary rebel. The surprising effect of which was an unanticipated number of friends that, in turn, afforded him a vast array of couches. He never slept at home again. Already a man before the first shave, education seemed redundant and he ventured out into the world that blessed the ambitious and cursed the nostalgic.
Still, halfway across the darkened globe and striving to juggle all of his lies, an adolescent part of Peter Bishop missed the sunlight that had been an undamaged mother.
'…I am as far as the infinite alphabet
made from yellow stars and ice.'
Susan Stewart