August stared up at the yellow stain on the wall. The stain wasn’t a stain anymore. It was a memory. A big, yellow memory that matched the color of the rising sun his family use to watch on a deserted beach during the summer. The stain was the same shade of the yellow bike his father use to ride around the drive way as he and his sister chased him, laughing. The yellow paint on the ceiling appeared through all his memories. It was the same breed of underserving happiness that embodied every single piece of lemon cake that was thrown out. Every yellow school bus that he was forcefully shoved onto by his mother who puffed on a yellow cigarette not bothering to wave goodbye as he pressed his nose against the sticky glass of the bus window. Every flickering light bulb that would come on, flooding their dark rooms with distorted light and the slurred breath of his drunken father. Every time he stopped at the landing to look at the happy family portrait with a broken yellow frame that no one wanted to replace. This was that yellow and the only yellow that August saw.
He folded his fingers intricately behind his head, as he watched the color float from memory to memory. Soon his sister would call him from the adjacent hallway to come and join her. Till then, August would sit in his aged room letting the smells and sounds overwhelm his slumped figure that lay lucidly on the neatly made bed.
When August was ten he sat in the same spot. His neck neatly craned back toward the ceiling, feet stretched out in a capacious manner. The arguing voices of both his parents echoed from the stairs. They were screaming again. Always screaming.
He tried to act like he didn’t care. That their angry tones didn’t want to make him clamp his hands over his ears and open his mouth to let out a scream that drowned out their voices. Instead he daydreamed. Eyes connected with the blank air ahead of him, he let his mind float as far away as possible, till the impious voices were no longer available for him to hear. Till the loud shouts were no longer loud, and all he felt was the emptiness of his world. His nothingness. It didn’t take long for his perfect oblivion to be shattered. His father burst into the room, with August’s mother’s dainty shadow twitching behind the doorway as she attempted to reason with him. His father was moving toward him, anger in his narrowed eyes, an anger that August had become accustomed to.

His despondent daydream was suddenly gone. It was eight years later, and he was now sitting on his old bed, finger ripping at the faded sheets, the memory still freshly brewing in his mind like a spider crawling through his bones. The past had been cracked by his sister’s incessant voice calling him to join her at the front door. It was time to leave. August exhaled as her voice got continually louder. He finally capitulated and, grabbing his coat that lay on the floor, left this room to join his sister at the front door. She muttered, criticizing him, as he came down the stairs and followed her out the badly cracked door that had not been replaced in a few decades. He stopped and waited as she firmly shut the door, checking that it was locked twice as if a big black monster that lived in the old house had the potential of getting out.

The car doors opened with a crackling noise. The two paused just before they got in and inadvertently looked at each other. They were exchanging thoughts. Why? Why were they bothering to go? Spending twenty sorrowful minutes in their childhood house was painful enough, and now…..Now they would top off the dessert of supposedly forgotten and buried resentments with their attendance.

They studied each other, both debating whether they could just leave the city, not go and forgot about everything. But August knew, as did his sibling, that forgetting again was not an opinion. He didn’t say it, she didn’t say it, but they both climbed into the car, a similar agreement was silently held between them. They would never forget. Not if they drove away and never came back, not if they burned down the house and every crocked escapade that took place in it. They would never forget. So now they would attempt to remember. Not the bruises, the liquor or the screaming, but the birthday parties, the sledding, the happiness, that had engulfed the tiniest miniscule bits of their childhood memories. As his sister pulled the car out of the driveway, August couldn’t help but believe that those memories, the happy ones, were buried so deeply behind the daily tirades of his current life that he would never be able to recall them.
His face pressed against the cold window, August watched as the depressing scenery of their old hometown pass along.

August had had his forehead pressed on the backseat window in a similar manner in which it was now. His mother was driving, his father sitting comatose in the passenger seat, staring blankly out the window.
This will be the last time, she had told them puffing in and out of a cigarette, this will be the last time that you’ll see your father. The siblings stared silently back at her as they sat on the stairs, hands tucked under their legs, big innocent eyes studying the expressions that cycled through their mother’s face as she gazed placidly over the children’s heads .

It was the one time they hadn’t fought. Both of them stayed quiet. The family went to the park. They sat on a blanket that his mother had packed and ate premade sandwiches in a numbing silence that seemed to not hold just them but the entire town. All voices were demoted to nothing but little whispers that barely penetrated their little picnic, on their little blanket, in their own private little world. They drove daddy to the hospital, at least that’s what mother called it, and left him there. Forever. That’s what she said when they asked how long he would be in the hospital. Forever and ever and ever, just like the end of your story books children, Happily Ever After.

August unstuck his face from the passenger seat window. The car had stopped. They were here. She was looking at him waiting for the cue to open the door and get out. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and took a deep breathe and with a slight pause he climbed from the car.

The gate to the cemetery loomed ahead, like the big ominous gateway on the Styx River. The path that they stepped onto twirled its way through the grey gravestones to the center of the cemetery. Ahead, not fully in the center, a few sober people stood around a greenery that upheld two closed black casket. The chilling silence that spread through the less then large number as the siblings approached matched the ambiance that encircled the entire event.
August looped arms with his sister, as they joined the mourners that stood around their parents’ caskets. The Priest had been waiting for them. He eyed August for a moment and began his sermon, his low gravel voice echoing through the emptiness surrounding them. And yet there was something there. Something that seemed to be filling the emptiness. August closed his eyes and just listened to the Priest’s voice.
Saturday mornings their father would leap in front of the television half way through the children’s cartoons. They would clap their hands and giggle no longer paying attention to their blue cereal bowls, or the Tom and Jerry antics that played on, now only as background music. Their father would hold up cards in their faces his voice rumbling throughout the house as he asked them to pick a card any card. Some late summer afternoons their mother would pull out the old cake mixer, and make mountains of lemon cake that everyone stuffed their faces with. Then the mother and the father sat on the couch, the children sat on the floor, overstuffed bellies extended, sugary faces pulled up into smiles, as old songs played on the cracked FM radio. Different and funny anecdotes were passed around till late in the night the parents attempted to get the children into bed, but they insisted on staying up and talking all through the night. Sometimes about nothing. Just talking to talk. They let the children stay up till the crack of dawn when everyone was tired and rubbing their eyes, needing a morning nap before the actual start of the day.
August felt his throat tighten, and warm tears leak from his eyes. There had always been something bad. Something that made him want to hate them. But there had always been something good. Something to make him forgive them. Forgive them for everything. He glanced at his sister whose usually stern face was now crinkled with crying. He tightened his arm around her, and freely let the sadness burn his face.
There they stood. Watching as the priest finished his last prayer, as people shook hands and left in their cars. The caskets were lowered into the ground, never to be seen again. They walked back to the car, winding their way back through the graveyard, arm in arm, wetted faces puffy and red with salty tears.
He stopped for a second as they reached the car. August turned and looked over the many gravestones that were the last physical manifestations of different family’s loved one. Soon that would be all that was left of his parents. Other than the nontangible memories. As sunlight cascaded through the big black shadows of the overhanging trees, he decided that he would only remember the good ones.