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........THE
FAMILIAR Vol 1, Iss 2..............................................................................................................................
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BEHIND
THE SCENES OF AN EMOTION LITERACY E-ZINE MISSION
STATEMENT THE FAMILIAR VOL. 1 ISS. 2. Missed an issue of the familiar? Click here to browse through our entire back-issue archive! |
bryce My name is Bryce, and I am a sixteen year old native to Seattle. Born in 1983 during the famous Thanksgiving Day Storm, I was raised in Kirkland with my parents and my sister, five years my senior, in an old house with a cast iron stairwell, built by my father, a full time potter. My father’s art still hangs on the walls to this very day, five years after we moved out and put our house up for rent. A nice couple moved all their stuff in with hand carts and heavy accents. The house was a quiet house, surrounded by old evergreens. The house lies shadowed below them, sunlight smattered lightly across the ground as the immense branches sway in the wind. The forest floor was constantly muffled and softened with years of undergrowth and ferns. The house itself seemed to almost hide beneath the trees, for it carried the same kind of sturdy disorder about it with additions hanging on it like a set a crutches. Peeking out between the bushes are small statues my father used to make and sell at street fairs. Strange statues. Most are the busts of Greek and Roman Gods, with feet and arms sprouting from the sides of their anguished faces, wrought of a dirty brown clay, glazed in subdued reds and glowering browns. The statues sit solemnly on the ground, half covered in dirt and neglect. The overgrown stone and concrete walkway to our secluded front door was silently guarded by these sulking creatures who hide on both sides, lining the walkway like nobles lining the red carpet for a king. The entrance to our front door was located up a dozen steps from the forest floor to an elevated deck of somber slimy cedar. Our front door was built of solid, powerful redwood, with a cast iron doorknocker of the head of a demon. It was lined by an intense latticework of the angry snarls and the deadly stares of once powerful Gods. Pan, grotesquely mutated with huge growths growing from his face, modeled after the artist's own penis, snarls as Jupiter glares a deadly look of intense foreboding, his damp hair clinging wetly to his face. Every hair falling across his head, every whisker jutting out from his face, molded with careful and painstaking precision, precision granted to the artist after years of dedicated expression. And standing silent guard over those hideous creatures was the face of a single small child, resting over the doorway with a familiar grin, eyes alight, a smile resting on his face. When most people walk up those steps, lined by immense evergreens and mossy, fern-covered ground and the structure begins to loom into view over the top of those steps, their steps slow to a careful stop. Their eyes widen a bit, and they swivel their head and look about the trees with a nervous fascinated smile as they begin to move their feet up the steps again. I grew up with that front door, I walked through it a million times, and I never really understood that it was anything but normal, anything but reality. And to this day, I feel that my front door was the greatest piece of art I ever have ever seen in my life, skillfully wrought by my very father’s own two hands. I believed that to very day my father brought it home in pieces. The renters eventually bought the house, and my father came home with it in his trunk of his Ford Mustang, separated into small enough chunks so he would only have to make one trip. I keep little bits and pieces of it in my room as a solemn reminder. Pan’s penis-covered face always reminding me of who I am.
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