Free The Counting-Downers by A. J. Compton

brave until his very last breath.
    My grandfather is quiet for a while, and I think he’s fallen asleep before he slurs something that sounds a lot like, “I want to be just like him when I grow up, Pappa.” His speech is fading these days so it can be hard to decipher his words.
    How I manage to hold it together, I have no idea. I lean over and kiss his forehead again before rolling out of bed and tucking him in for a second time. “You will be,” I tell him. “Sleep well, son.”
    “Goodnight, Pappa,” he murmurs as I close the door behind him.
    Stumbling to my room, I close the door behind me and stagger to the bed, where I just collapse into myself.
    I shatter. I splinter. I break. I’m broken.
    I sob and sob and sob until my lungs plead for air and my eyes for mercy. I sob until I don’t have a single ounce of energy left. Days and weeks and months and years of repressed emotion pour out of my eyes and into my pillow drenching it and drowning me. I sob into the unsympathetic silence.
    When there are no tears left to shed, I force myself to think about anything other than the past two hours. I stare out into the blackness and bleakness through crimson eyes.
    My mind replays the events of the day as if watching a silent movie. With all of the sadness and tears, I forgot I laughed today. That for half a second, I was carefree and able to act my age.
    Today, for a few hours, I was Tristan , not someone who was fictional or dead. Someone saw me . The real me. The me I’m starting to lose with all of the characters I have to play.
    And it felt incredible to be seen.
    I try to hold onto that feeling with frantic desperation, but it eludes my grasp like the flash of light you see behind your eyelids as you close your eyes. I’m not sure when I’ll have the chance to experience it again.
    My last thought as I fall into a restless slumber is of the ray of sunshine with golden hair and emerald eyes who, for a brief moment, seemed like my salvation.

 

     
    CLOYING TENSION FLOWS in the air as I help my mom clear away the final remnants of the day in silence, suffocating me and slowing my movements.
    My grandmother, who still wouldn’t talk to or look at me, retired to her guesthouse on the edge of the property not long after I finished tucking Oscar in for his bedtime. I don’t know if it was because she was born and raised in a frosty climate, but my grandmother is the queen of freezing people out. She’s a master at the Scandinavian ‘tough love’ approach to parenting and life.
    She still lives in the quaint Californian fishing village of Morro Bay where my father had grown up. Making the voyage across the ocean in the sixties, after changing their surname to something more ‘American’ sounding, my grandparents had settled in the idyllic coastal town as they said it reminded them of their own childhoods in Norway. Every day they opened the windows and let in the fresh scents of seawater, ocean breeze, and nostalgia.
    Though I’ve never been to Norway, summer visits to the bay mean I have my own childhood memories of whale watching and kayaking. Even after my dad had moved out and my paternal grandfather had died, my obstinate Farmor refused to move in with us until, in her words, she was ‘unfunctionably senile.’ I told her that wasn’t a word. Or a thing. In any language. Needless to say, that didn’t go down well.
    It was temporary, but after years of persuading, she had come to stay with us to spend time with my dad during his last few months under the guise of ‘builders’ remodeling her property. My grandmother is many things; stubborn, strong, strict, and scary , but a good liar isn’t one of them.
    Although he never said anything, I’m sure from the shrewd smile he gave her as she explained her predicament that Dad knew her true motivations for coming to stay. As her long-standing feud with the mailman attests to, my grandmother would never let anyone onto her property, let alone