When the smooth worn nub of the peg leg that had taken all of the old sea-man’s left-legged steps in the years that had passed since his seventeenth plunged through one of the creaking old floorboards and triggered the collapse of the the lighthouse’s circular second story room’s floor, thick brown clouds of dust that contained the dangerous trajectories of loose nails and splintery chunks from the floorboards adjacent to the one that broke through engulfed him. He was positive that those millions of thunking steps could not have been the cause of his present situation (left thigh in the floor and his other leg’s knee hitting the boards beginning its own downward course) but that it must be for some other reason: the unnatural—if he could call it that—actions of another man. This became apparent to him when the lighthouse’s giant bulb circled around a few degrees more, so that the blindingly bright ray of light emitting from the giant humming orb was right in his face, flooding his vision with painful white light that he could not evade, trapped with his leg in the floor. He received the hot light directly and his vision filled up with not only a white oblivion but also red-blue bordered black ghosts of spots that were the dead nerves’ hollow reply to his brain that his retinas were being burned and destroyed, a visual phenomenon accompanied by a searing headache that caused his son’s face—specifically the boy’s face as it appeared when he had robbed him many years ago—to flash across his mind, announcing and solidifying in his mind who the perpetrator of the collapse of the ancient now-finally crumbling lighthouse was, who exactly it was that had implemented the destruction of the only thing in the town older than himself, who it was that would perform execution upon the old man who had been the occupant of the room for the majority of a near-century, decades that had consisted of meager food and eager drink and of the maintenance of the rotating iridescent broadcast that informed the navigation of only a very few number of captains anymore, as the port’s better days were long gone, washed and eroded away with history, footprints of entropy like the ones tracked across his shale-colored jacket in superbrightly lit details: the grease stains symmetrical on both sides of his hips left and reinforced from years of carrying pocketed food; the thick tangle of facial hair that was his beard; the smell of him; the jagged tear in his jacket that exposed a liner of the palest shade of blue, the fibers loose and frayed along the perimeter of the hole that he wore over his heart that had been there, the hole, longer than he could remember. He couldn’t remember much but this he remembered because the why and how of the hole had made such a strong impression: the dire circumstances, the force and combination of emotions that made his blood vibrate and his chest tighten as if some weird psychic muscle he had never used before had gathered his entire inner self into a kinetic cannonball for and around that single moment, had condensed his mind the way an athlete would bend his knees and lower his body in preparation for some action. What seemed at the time to the then-not-so old sea-man to be just another ugly midnight robbery, a necessity of survival, was not as consequently benign as he was used to: the look on his boy’s face years ago as he clawed at the jacket like a cat in a bath, fingers hooking into the chest pocket of the then-not-so old sea-man’s jacket, ripping it out and leaving the triangular hole, had revealed immediately the impact of the moment, prophesying with crystalline clarity of emotion and foggy facts his father’s death scene. The then-not-so old sea-man had left his sword in the boy’s chest, grabbed the loot and vanished into the night, back to the lighthouse which he would never leave again, haunted for the rest of his life by the boy’s facial expression that had been splatter-marks, eyes and mouth peeled wide in mortal horror, covered by some actual splatter-marks of bodily fluid that had squirted from his body as the then-not-so old sea-man’s sword had jerked upwards through the boy’s ribcage, leaving a wound not fatal, as the then-not-so old sea-man had assumed at the time, a wound that had developed thick scar tissue, which the son of the old sea-man tenderly and contemplatively rubbed, standing on the beach, watching the lighthouse collapse into the foamy break of the waves below, squinting, trying to make out the figure of a peg legged man. The enormous bulb rolled into the dark water and ceased to glow until it hit rock and shattered into many tiny fragments that glazed the tide, reflecting the moon.
