I was ten, or eleven, I never remember which, but we still lived in the old house with the big backyard--big as all the fucking world, I heard my dad say once, and I got in trouble when I said it to our neighbor, Mrs. McCullough.  There were bushes everywhere—hydrangea, jasmine, roses in every color in the spring. There were oak and magnolia trees to climb, and we played hide-and-seek in thick bouquets of honeysuckle vine.  

Back then, when I heard my uncle talk I remember thinking it sounded messy in his head, like the way my room looked if I forgot to make the bed or put my clothes away. Sometimes he looked at us as if he'd woken up from a dream, and he would sort of laugh at our surprise. And we would sort of laugh, as if it made us all the same--then one day we weren't laughing anymore.    

It was spring, or maybe early summer, I never remember that sort of thing exactly--but I remember the magenta roses were in bloom, and the flowers on the hydrangea bushes sported bursts of powder blue and lavender and pink; the butter-yellow jasmine split their calyxes in quarters, and I remember pearls of syrup in the honeysuckle vines. 

When my uncle called that morning I watched my dad talking on my blue princess phone, but I don't remember why we were picking him that afternoon. In my dad's big hand, the phone looked small and useless, like some once treasured, now discarded toy, and I remember words I know my father can't forget.

"Goddammit I don't have time for this shit...I've got a wife and a kid-jesus, and I work all the damn time now I've got you calling me with this bullshit like I don't have enough to fuckin'...unh-unh...no...NO...hey...unh-unh, NO, hey, you know what ? Fuck you. Just fuck you."

He slammed the phone down, hard enough to crack the casing, and after slamming every door to every room he slammed the front door harder; he left and didn't come back until that afternoon. 

The carpet in my room was blue in deep 70's shag and once submerged and swimming through the nylon-polyester sea, I hunted every shade in the 64 color crayon box-- navy, cornflower, turquoise, aquamarine, sky blue, violet-blue, blue-violet and just blue; it was not until I heard the front door opening again that I gave up wondering if on a second dive, I might find just-violet in there too.

That afternoon, in a bedroom off the hall, sunlight misted with the dust of discharged metal shot through a broken window shade, like the stream from a projector in some illicit theater somewhere; in a movie or on TV, a slow pan shows the aftermath without its author, blood and only blood is misted on the walls. In the movies and TV the message registers mid-brain: you've been spared a sight you wouldn't be the same if you had seen.

***

I remember watching from a corner of the room, where I was small and useless, like that phone in my dad's hand--I would've sold my soul to make a second go away. When the services were over, and the relatives all gone, I pulled the roses from the bush, bare-handed, by the stem, and stood behind the oak trees I once climbed: but there was nowhere left to hide in all the fucking world, and I was much too old at twelve for honeysuckle vines.