BY SOMEBODY

 

We Don’t Talk About It

“If your father were mortal, he’d be doing life in a federal penitentary,” Sylvia’s mother said.

Sylvia: “What did he do?”

“We don’t talk about it.”

“Did he murder someone? Punish him how?”

“Oberon has his special ways of punishing. When you come of age on your sixty-sixth birthday you can visit him and see.”

. . .

Waiting, Sylvia wrote her paper on “The Innocence Project at Cardozo School of Law.” She wondered if her father had been punished erronesously.

. . .

Sylvia to her grandmother: “I’ve come to see father.”

“He’s had to adapt. Now he plays ‘Among Us’ with his goblin friends in the basement.”

“Dad, it’s me—Sylvia.” Her father went back to the screen.

“Can we talk? I want to know what you did.”

Finally, her father led her up the 666 stairs to the attic, a Long Room Library with hundreds of apple boxes stuffed with papers. He left without a word.

Sylvia opened an unlabeled box, found tiny bits of paper that had been run through a shredder. “Great,” she thought.

. . .

It took her weeks to dump them all around him, a chaos of litter. “ This is your new game. Paste these together. She handed him tape.”

. . .

Ten years later she read the reassembled documents. “Oberon broke the Sword of Truth across your back, robbing you of speech and mind just because you spoke the recipe for Gooseberry Cordial? “