Peter Sutherland

Peter Sutherland

Work from his website (narrative home page below).

“When I was a kid we lived in Michigan (until we moved to colorado when I was 8). We had lived on a lake, we had a big back deck my dad had built. Past that there was a long lawn leading up to the shore of the lake. The house sat on a hill so it almost l felt like you were looking out into a valley when you looked at the water. The deck is a blurry memory but it was a stage for some very visual moments. We had 2 cats, one was grey one was orange, their names were Casper and Astoria. My parents had large paintings with one orange and one grey cat. I found it hard to understand why they had these, and which had come first, the paintings or the cats. The grey one got really sick once, I walked out onto the back deck and saw him sitting on the railing and there was a bunch of ooze coming out of his ear. It looked like vomit was coming out of the inside of his head. The cat’s face looked really unhappy as if he knew the end was coming. It freaked me out and I think the memory of that cats messed up ear turned into a series of bad dreams. The dreams were about a large skunk, who had some human qualities and sharp teeth. In the dreams the skunk always wanted to come in the house, it would patiently hang out on the back deck and wait to come in, other times it would be more frustrated and anxious to enter the house . These were very scary dreams and I’m getting chills as I’m writing this. I have another memory of the first time I looked at the eclipse from the deck. I must have been 6, the eclipse came and all the children were warned not to look directly at it because it would ruin your eyes. My dad went to the shed and pulled out a weldiing mask. Everyone in my family passed the mask around and took turns staring up the eclipse. The tint on the welding glass was so dark that the eclipse looked like a red circle. Another time we were out on the deck and there was a meteor that dropped and i remember looking right at it and I could hear it sizzle. It looked like it might have fallen into the lake but my dad assured me it was far away and had probably burnt up when it got near the earth. So yeah, the back deck, the bloody ear, the skunk with sharp teeth, the mask, the red circle, the sound of the meteor, and the joy.” – Peter Sutherland (the links are missing, so go to his actual site).