It was his 70th birthday. He was sure he was going to live to be 82 -- everyone did, around these parts -- before he would be replaced by his successor, his only son, who would take the whole summer to generate.
He was pretty sure that his son would settle in the same place as he had, and where all of his ancestors had for the last thirty-odd years, although he'd heard the rumours about a possible change of location coming up in the years ahead. But that wasn't his focus at the moment.
He'd found himself on the Island earlier in his life. It was his 56th birthday. It had gone well, for the most part, but it seemed as though he'd left something of his behind when he left that Island. He'd been struggling to find it, but now, he felt the Island coming to him, for his 70th, and he felt it bringing it back what he had lost.
He found it curious how some of them aged faster than others. He thought about how The Cat was still just 66, and yet, for him, 70 was looming just around the corner. And how sometimes, birthdays would accumulate in clumps, and sometimes, The Document would mandate enormous, agonizingly boring breaks between them.
He felt himself growing old, but with a renewed sense of passion and killer instinct. He felt his injuries healing, the lingering knots in his groin and hip mending more and more with each passing birthday. But he was running out of time. He knew that The Pond would continue to grow at the wrong time, that one couldn't count on it to stagnate.
He loved getting presents at his birthdays. The best ones were when he'd get two presents. But it seemed like everyone was getting presents at the wrong times these days, and that sometimes, there were birthdays where people were getting three presents split between two of them. That didn't seem right.
The Island, at first, seemed sympathetic to him. He hadn't been getting many presents lately -- just 8 in his last 10 birthdays. But he knew that there was no place for sympathy. After all, he needed to get more presents, as many presents as he could, if he was to catch The Constellation and The Slope for the final slots to the afterlife, where one could live past 82 and contend for eternal enshrinement in history.
It was time to dig deep. He needed to find himself once and for all. He needed to embrace his legacy as... The Flame.
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I didn't get more than two sentences in but it reminded me of one of those cringeworthy facebook posts you see recently single girls posting all the time.
"He didn't appreciate her for the delicate flower she was, so she left him and fully blossomed into the beautiful rare orchid she is now" or some other eye roller along those lines.
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Flames/Islanders/5:00 PM/Scotiabank Saddledome/SN
