The U Turn 02:06

No, it was quite certain. She wasn't adopted. That wasn't it at all. It wasn't the big stick that Gold was dangling over her.

She didn't know, but perhaps she hoped; the old man grieved the living loss of Gold.

"I worry about you, " he let out on one of those long cold walks up and down the hall or was it beyond the garden... no matter. It was the heavy sadness in the landscape and shadow of his body that set the scene in her memory. All Biblical in proportion:

"You are the other child in the prodigal son," and Silver understood how much he would like to bring Goldy back, to shine.

"It's fine." The silence that followed cemented something between them. Gold would forever be ignorant. When she came back, it was too late for her, for Silvie, for the old man.

Silver would be cold, and the old man would pass away a year later, broken.

When Goldy returned, she brought pictures. Recent photographs, exposing (she thought) a sordid past... Stumbling, on a trip to Europe, into an aunt...

"Oh, you're here finally!! then I must show you around..."

Photos, figures, faces in particular, say so much without need of words. Picture after picture. And when the old man saw them he breath out, more to himself than to Gold or Silver, "Ahhh... that is what we look like..."

The words escaping from a cavernous internal prison; lean, hunger stricken, and blinking back from lack of sun.

The emotion was evident. Not at all like in these hole punched letters— that amounted to a sea of typography, with only vague mental images and no real way to picture the addressee. Not a single clear photograph. Gold thought Silver might as well be penning a protagonist into her frivolous existence. Sanity hanging on a metallic thread, bleeding black and blue words on a page.

If Silver were standing in front of her now, still there would be no satisfactory answer:

"We are all children, growing older. What are appearances? We'll be revealed only in the mirror of death. Final proofs. 100%."

So as to the question of Love, which hung over the head of the old man, as much as over Gold and Silver, she hesitated to ask. Gold in heart of hearts was honest enough, at least with herself, to confess that she liked to be wanted.

Even if it meant she was only fucked.