12.

“Hello, Carl.”

The door to my parents’ bedroom had opened, and the landing was filled with light, and now my unadjusted eyes were blinded by the brightness rather than the gloom.

“How are you doing today?”

In the doorway was the tall silhouette I had recollected in the record shop. It was my dad, backlit, stooping down to look at me while I blinked and squinted against the glare.

Then he was walking in my direction, right at me it seemed, a looming shadow—and I thought we were going to collide and he would send me falling backwards down the stairs. But simultaneously, something was happening to the perspective of the shadow—it was looming unnaturally large, unnaturally fast. And at the moment I expected and braced for the collision, and my dad’s shadow swamped even my peripheral vision in blackness—he simply passed right through me.

 

 

I made sense of it moments later. He hadn’t walked through me, he had walked over me. That is how large he was, and how small I was.

I turned quickly, just in time to see his figure reach the bottom of the stairs. Then he had doubled back around, and was walking down the hallway towards the living room. Frustratingly, if it hadn’t been for my angled viewpoint at the top of the stairs, I might have been able to see him clearly. But instead I saw him only as a moving shape, a zoetrope between the banisters.