Early Onset

Matt Gillick

 

Fifteen years had passed since my father never returned to Seat 14, Row A after promising two Camden Yards hot dogs, and now he’s on the phone, out of courtesy, he says, telling me our family possesses a gene that eats away at your vision—and at that exact moment, I see a floater crawling like a worm across a Kodak lens in the setting sky and think, oh for the love of God, why did it have to be now—why now do I get retinitis pigmentosa. My father says the peripherals will be the first to go, encasing me and my future in a withering tunnel vision, but strangely, I suppose I wouldn’t have minded going dark way before, before I saw myself knock a prep school kid over the head with a metal thermos after Friday chapel who’d said abortion in the case of rape, incest, or me was perfectly acceptable, preferred even, but why not lose it even earlier, at age 9, seeing my grandfather, eyes closed while in bed listening to a documentary about Egyptian tombs on an 80s-era RCA, grateful he couldn’t bear witness to what a Purple Heart got him outside his Cedar Gardens nursing home window overlooking the ashy brown Fort Worth freeway?

 

Gillick is from Northern Virginia. People can find his other work at mattgillick.com.