It must have ended somewhere.

Face wrinkled like rags, the little grey haired old man who once stood tree-length tall, now hunched over as if carrying a backpack of decade old bricks was bending his spine. Reminds me of how inevitably life passes.

Momma once measured every inch of my stature on the wall of our dining room. Every day on our way out to catch the school bus, I’d grab an apple and a kiss that I tugged away from because of the moist red lipstick marks she’d leave. I used to gag. But now, Id give anything to feel the lips of my mother again, just to remember the sound her mouth made when she sang in the mornings, or the way she would smack her gum and then lick her hand to comb my hair. This was before the resentment spread like a malignant cancer for making me wear girls clothes, oh, and for being held responsible for my fathers suicide.

After school, I’d imagine most dads would come home yanking off his tie to a warm cooked meal, as the perfect American mom vacuumed the house in four inch stiletto's and a pearl necklace. That was not our home. Instead, my mom was and I quote, “The American Bitch” to my dad.

It kind of all feels like a dream I dreamt once upon a time ago, that I can hardly piece together.

On summers, Dad would take us up to the cabin ridge in Walloon Lake, the untouched wilderness of Northern Michigan where we'd go hunting for pretty much anything. My dad loved to hunt. Birds, geese, deer, hogs, you name it.

He rarely ever missed until one hunt, he accidently dropped an owl from the tree. It was beautiful. Big, with bright yellow eyes. We took it home that weekend where it sat stuffed nicely, seated on our mantle just below the set of deer head collection and porcupine skin.

As a boy, I took my first job as a young reporter for the Kansas City Star newspaper. I was only 16 at the time. This is where I found my niche for journalism, which introduced me to writing for the rest of my sappy career.

Reaching the age of maturity at 18, I moved to Italy where I then, became a man.

I volunteered for Red Cross as an ambulance driver during World War I. This was the closest I could get to “active duty” for now due to some eyesight issues that couldn’t even get me into basic training. A few of us hunkered down in a mezzanine styled apartment along the ancient brick streets that lead to a roaring body of water, where sea creatures bellowed at night fall.

While in Italy, on the line of duty around my 19th birthday, I woke up to an angel in all white. I asked her if I was dead because she was probably the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Slanting her lips upward as they gently parted, tilting her head while observing my face, she let out a beautiful noise of laughter, then preceded.

"Sir, you were in a horrific accident struck by an Austrian mortar shell in the dugout and almost didn’t make it. We were able to get most of the fragments of shell out, but you have a long road of recovery ahead”

Watching her lips move in slow motion, I digressed respectfully.

“I can’t retain any information until you tell me your name” I muttered through the gauze covering most of my face.

Smiling again, she responded, "Agnes. Agnes Von K. I am the nurse assigned to your aid.”

“Agnes. Could you do me the honor of being my aid for the rest of my life?” I boldly suggested in a smashing gesture but with every stern bone in my broken body.

And she could tell. She went from blushing, to a weighty line in her lips. She was insanely crazy about me too.

Within just a couple of months I planned to marry the big doe-eyed brunette nurse. That was, until I moved back home with my parents from the injuries I sustained and destiny had other plans. Well, Agnes did when I received a devastating ‘Dear John’ letter. She informed me she pursued another man and was engaged to an Italian.

The look on my mothers face every time I’d go to check the mail told me a different message. But I refused to believe it when I didn’t hear from Agnes for months.

My mother viewed me as a different person around this point. War and love had granted me experiences beyond my capacity at such a young age, but I put it to use in my many novels.

Commemorating the past is usually what does it. The vastness of life that just rolls by whichever way it wants without your permission. As if my very own life span passed me like a freight train all while standing still.

The heaviness I poured on my typewriter that night. And from there on provoked by abandonment and trial, I have not stopped writing about this vast phantom ever since.

In 1923, my first book was published and about some odd twenty-somethin years later, I worked along side of the Navy during my time spent on my fishing boat, keeping watch for enemy submarine intrusions. This was around the time I published “The Old Man and the Sea,” the biggest success of my career.

Though I was acquainted with love again, and fathered my own children, this era is usually the center focus of my writing, as I have now endured two wars, love and loss.

Once the kids were grown, this only provoked flashbacks to be more vivid, even if I tried to block them out. The smells of burnt flesh caked against the wood walls of the hotel after being hit by a dry lightning storm, burnt to chips.

I sit here, reminiscing events of old, like a flash before my eyes. Yesterday's Tribune is gone. All of my accomplishments, and wins of the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize can’t erase the canoe that went to pieces on the beach that day.

Rummaging through old letters and dusty magazines, I cracked open a bottle of bourbon and swift it back neatly and then again as it dripped in the weeds of my haggard sandy beard. Drifting, loose sails further off shore, slurring the words

“Yo, ho, all hands,

Hoist the colours high,

Heave ho, thieves and beggars

Never shall we die.”

Thinking to myself how everything, even this moment, must have ended somewhere.

*

Editors Note:

Hemingway called his writing style the iceberg theory, the facts float above the water and the symbolism and implied meanings hide below the surface. His style could be described as a style "in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly."