Descendant

When Joshua was a baby, his father went away on a trip for a couple of days. It really was only a couple of days, but when his father returned—as it happened, on Joshua’s first birthday—Joshua was so overwhelmed with seeing him that he clung to his father all day. Joshua’s father walked around with Joshua holding tight to his shoulder and neck, and kept speaking to his son in a low, calming voice. He told Joshua everything that had happened on his trip, and then, as Joshua didn’t let go, he continued telling Joshua stories from other and other times in his life. Joshua’s father’s voice went right into Joshua’s nearby ear, or perhaps it vibrated straight from his chest into Joshua’s body, and the next morning, Joshua had grown more than a bit bigger, and his vocabulary had, too.

When Joshua turned two, his grandfather came for a visit, and Joshua listened to him talk about his life, as Joshua’s eyes swelled larger and larger with each anecdote.

On Joshua’s third birthday, his family visited his great-grandfather, who was frail, but still had strength to tell his memories, which the whole family was eager to hear from him and which Joshua imbibed through all his pores.

By now Joshua and his family had established a pattern, and patterns are the source of habit, and habit has the strength of law. But laws are for the living, and Joshua’s great-great-grandfather was not among the living. So for Joshua’s fourth birthday, his father dressed himself in clothes that that ancestor might have worn, and he told Joshua stories he knew about how his own great-grandfather (Joshua’s great-great-) had lived.

So they continued from birthday to birthday, retreating one generation per year. And each year, Joshua had a discrete leap in growth around his birthday, both his physical size and his maturity. He got quite large, very clever and insightful, and rather serious. By the time he was forty-nine, he was a mountain who gazed out over the rooves of houses, and he spoke in a deep, authoritative bass. A few days before his fiftieth birthday, Joshua swelled a little more in anticipation of the day.

And then Joshua’s father passed away.

Joshua shrank back down to the size he had been for the past year. He didn’t just revert, though, exactly. He collapsed in on himself, the top left side of his head and shoulder crunched in, like a crater. Those dents remained for the seven days of mourning. Upon uncovering the mirrors in his house at the end of the seven days, Joshua tried to pop his head and shoulder back out into their proper shape, and for several weeks he struggled at that task. On the thirtieth day after burying his father, Joshua succeeded to reverse the concavity in his head and shoulder, but he cracked open in the process. Out through the fissure stepped the ancient sage, his forty-ninth generation grandfather, whom he had met the previous year, and then the forty-eighth, and the forty-seventh, and so on, as Joshua’s giant, stretched-out, fifty-year-old hide slumped down to a pile on the floor. Joshua’s father stood there among all the other passed ancestors, and Joshua, tiny and scared emerging from deep inside the mass, reached up and clung to his father all day.