flash by flawnt

… perhaps his attitude wasn’t the issue. Perhaps it was his father’s beard, his father’s face, or his mother’s hand on his face. James’ parents had disappeared during a flood. It was a memorable scene, fixed in his memory anyway: how his father, then a young strapper, passed baby James to his wife, who passed it to her sister Agatha one moment before a giant wave took the couple out to sea, never to be seen again. A painless, sightless, still bowing out of one’s loved ones if there was one. Nothing but this scene had ever been imparted to him by his uncle and aunt, and it weighed heavily on his chest like an entire ocean …