I was a child then… by the wintery light of that afternoon, I saw a baby boy placed on a table top by his mother. She then left him to perpetrate dutifulness about the house. There also was an apple on the table. In a few minutes, the infant reached for the apple but it was beyond his grasp. Physically, he had not matured enough to roll on his stomach and crawl. Consequently, the baby began crying because he could not have the fruit.

Soon, a man approached the table. He picked up the apple, held it out toward the boy and pulled it away when the child reached for it. He laughed when the infant began crying even more. Again the man did the same thing, and mocked the same results.

I watched in cowed anguish until I could no longer restrain myself. “Why are you doing that?” I cried out.

“Oh, it’s good for him!” the man laughed, as he offered and denied the apple to the infant. Once more the child’s crying arose. Over and over the strange game was played. Only when the man tired of it did it come to an end, with that laughter ringing in my ear.

It seems the watery light of that afternoon remains: The baby was my brother. The man was my father; he also was a preacher.

The ebb and flow of the years has changed some graffiti marks on the walls of circumstance since then, though my brother grew up to become a self-important, money-grubbing church deacon and I became an infidel – my father never changed.  

And often that laughter still mocks my ears, peeling back the layers of those altered yet somehow unchanged marks; fortunately for that which is yet to be written in the hallways of time, apples are still apples and babies are babies.