The Memoir Man

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Twiddling thumbs instead of doing what Cassius Moon was supposed to be doing was his one and only specialty.  Family called him inadequate.  Teachers called him slow.  Society called him a freak.  His long black hair never failed to leave its position covering his eyes.  He told himself that he thought better that way.  By seeing the world through a veiled version of itself, he thought that was the way he thought.  Halfway in and halfway out.  Living, but not among others.

The pen scrawls fiercely on the paper, not bothering with the fine blue lines.  The tip writes factors and words and bits of foreign tongue no one really knows but the author or this magnificent feat.  Cassius Moon.  No, he did not make up his own language but he had joined together many languages, lost languages and current ones too.

Cassius had a library of tattered notebooks.  They lined the walls of his humble room, piling in stacks as tall as the ceiling.  They were stashed under his bed and stuffed into the cramped closet.  The journals filled the space, and there was no other room for anything but a tiny bed and desk.  This was his thinking space.

Here was where he cracked codes and solved puzzles.  All of the knowledge filled his capacious mind to the brim, but was still hungry for more.  While he scrawled and scribbled his necklace never failed to leave his hand.

His fingers trace the intricate outline of the key.  The familiar gouges fall into place as normal while his thumb glides over the familiar words.  They are etched into place with fine cursive handwriting with such fluency it was breathtaking.  The key to my heart, they read.  Five words that Cassius Moon grew up saying.

Cassius was not lied to when he was told about his mother.  After all, this was her necklace.  When it had been given to him at the age of seven, it had been accompanied by a letter.  Somewhere, it lay tucked into a notebook lost forever in a sea of pages.  This mattered not, however, because Cassius had memorized the note word for word the day he had received it.

A dull memory floats into his mind of a young child, alone and lost, sitting on a bed accompanied only by a ratty quilt and a tear soaked pillow.  An enigmatic figure glides into the room.  Red shoes, Cassius recalls, she was wearing red high heeled shoes.  The clicking sounds come evenly and leave without a moment’s hesitation.  A hand reaches down and lays a key strung on a silver chain and a letter sealed shut by red wax.  Red was Cassius’s inauspicious color.  The red blood, the red shoes, and the red wax.

Small shaky hands reach down and gingerly tear the wax off of the envelope.  There is a lone piece of parchment inside, engraved with the familiar brusque handwriting he had learned to know as his mother’s.  It was addressed to a boy named Cassius Moon.  And this is where the story began.