I rushed to the Cretan City government center, familiar as I was from our numerous dealings with the zoning office in the course of the Farsky case. Panic rising in tandem with confusion, I tossed the other mail aside and gathered my coat, barely lacing my work boots in my haste. I was unstudied, having worked my entire adult life, but it was clear that the city meant to divest my family of our home. My jaw dropped, my heart hammering in my chest as I read the words forfeiture, demolition, and settlement. Knowing my mother would worry if she saw more correspondence from the city zoning office, I opened the envelope and scanned the letter, picking through the legal jargon and unnecessary fluff. I was twenty-three when the letter arrived, the only thing in the mail pile that wasn’t an overdue bill or a threat from a collections agency. That belief would be exploited, beginning my descent into a world I could never have been prepared for. I believed it was special, even if it was the force anchoring us in misery so much of the time. It was really a beautiful building, all Gothic facade and mysterious, experimental architecture the likes of which no one ever seemed to recognize. Our love for the thing that represented my parents’ failings the place that meant the world to me, its expansive emptiness my only escape from the cruel circumstances we lived in my safe place away from my father’s drunken stumblings and the cold things he would mutter to me when the liquor had him all of that and more. Still, it was the house itself that this story really begins with. The occasional acquaintance from school would try to befriend me, or I’d catch the eye of admirers from time to time, but I never felt as though I could really identify with those around me. The years slipped by, my adolescence stolen by the pressing need that poverty created, isolating me from my peers. I ceased to have any kind of father figure, and between my mother and I, we struggled to make things work. My father turned to alcohol as a cheaper method to lose himself. Soon enough, even stealing from my mother couldn’t pay for the amount of Reflex that he needed. Crippling depression left my father a husk of himself, and though he promised again and again that he would stop, I could tell that he found our mundane, everyday speed to be a special kind of hell. What they didn’t mention was that when the user came down, the withdrawals would render them effectively tortured by the molasses pace of reality. People claimed it made the human brain process things at a rate of seven to one. The drug was new on the streets at the time, a nasty inhalant called Reflex. That was the year I finally registered the existence of my father’s addiction, and the strains it had placed upon my mother. They would never stop.īeing so young, I don’t think I truly realized how bad things had become until I was thirteen. The hard years began then, just when things had seemed so sweet. My father had stopped his work to pursue the plan, and even with my mother’s royalty income from her poetry collections and a professor’s salary, they could barely manage to make payments on their numerous loans. My parents-whose tireless efforts had finally yielded them deliverance from the constant struggle of being poor artists-were financially ruined. Their zealous desire to realize the dream had arrived too soon, and in a matter of months the proposal had fallen through. “We’ll fill it,” I remember my mother saying to us, that first dusty afternoon as we ate dinner on the ancient hardwood floors, “even if it takes us a lifetime.” I was six when we moved into that house, our things hardly filling a quarter of the space when all was said and done. They bought an old house in the heart of soon-to-be Farsky, as architectural restoration was one of the plan’s central themes. Initially reluctant, my father was soon swept up in her vision, investing himself thoroughly in hopes of creating an ideal environment for me to be raised in. She threw herself into the project obsessively, dragging our little family along for the ride. My mother was a member of the Farsky development team, a brilliant poet whose praise for the plan’s ambition had sparked the initial flood of donations and grants from the city’s collegiate upper-crust. A neighborhood half-built was left unfinished as a sweeping wave of commercial development took the public’s focus. Foul play was cited by the team of city planners and art historians that had originally proposed the Farsky model, but after an exhaustive legal battle with the new Cretan mayor’s office, the case was dropped. Originally intended to be the next big project, a hub of cultural significance, the largest grant funding the would-be arts district had mysteriously dissipated following an infamous mayoral election. I grew up hungry in the poorest corner of Cretan City, a tragedy of fallen potential called Farsky.
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