Extenuating Circumstances by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Penzler Publishers

FAMILY

The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed—neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness (though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica) had eased into the valley from the industrial regions to the north, and there were nights when the sun set slowly at the western horizon as if sinking through a porous red mass, and there were days when a hard-glaring moon like bone remained fixed in a single position, prominent in the sky. Above the patchwork of excavated land bordering our property—all of which had formerly been our property in Grandfather’s time: thousands of acres of fertile soil and open grazing land—a curious fibrillating rainbow sometimes appeared, its colors shifting even as you stared, shades of blue, turquoise, iridescent green, russet red, a lovely translucent gold that dissolved to moisture as the thermal breeze stirred, warm and stale as an exhaled breath. As if I’d run excited to tell others of the rainbow, it was likely to have vanished when they came.

“Liar!” my older brothers and sisters said, “—don’t promise rainbows when there aren’t any!”

Father laid his hand on my head, saying, with a smiling frown, “Don’t speak of anything if you aren’t certain it will be true for others, not simply for yourself. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Father,” I said quietly. Though I did not understand.

This story begins in the time of family celebration—after Father made a great profit selling all but fifteen acres of his inheritance from Grandfather; and he and Mother were like a honeymoon couple, giddy with relief at having escaped the fate of most of our neighbors in the Valley, rancher-rivals of Grandfather’s, and their descendants, who had sold off their property before the market began to realize its full potential. (“Full potential’’ was a term Father often uttered, as if its taste pleased him.) Now these old rivals were without land, and their investments yielded low returns; they’d gone away to live in cities of ever-increasing disorder, where no country people, especially once-aristocratic country people, could endure to live for long. They’d virtually prostituted themselves, Father said, “—and for so little!”

It was a proverb of Grandfather’s time that a curse would befall anyone in the Valley who gloated over a neighbor’s misfortune but, as Father observed, “It’s damned difficult not to feel superior, sometimes.” And Mother said, kissing him. “Darling—you’re absolutely right!”

Our house was made of granite, limestone, and beautiful red­-orange brick; the new wing, designed by a famous Japanese architect, was mainly tinted glass, overlooking the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles and on humid-hazy days we could barely see beyond the fence at the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof of the house: in his white suit (linen in warm weather, light wool in cold), cream-colored fedora cocked back on his head, high-heeled leather-tooled boots, he spent most of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof, observing through

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