#dundun

His despondency shows vividly when he covers the words in art. An entire page bears the face of a woman. The likeness is shaded around the eyes, in the arch of their nose. It must be his mother, perhaps. Maybe a sister. You turn the page, marveling at the artistry line in dark charcoal. A rifle. A bird. A skull. Cigars, scotch. Dog tags. A cross. Bible passages with toiling lines circled around them. Notes. Little insights stenciled into the margins. 

Another page speaks about head trauma. Brain injury. Bullet fragments. Low caliber. tbi is circled in blue with lines branching out from the side of the curve. impaired thinking. memory issues. personality changes, depression. 

remarkable the cognitive recovery is stenciled in between the passages over and over again, as if he was reinforcing this notion to himself. 

It's jarring. Uncomfortable. 

The next several pages are even moreso. It screams its loneliness into the thin paper and you read each divot until you can't anymore. Until the words run together, and stop making sense. It's all nonsensical. Scribbles, doodles, and numbers that mean nothing to you at all. Unnerved, you go to put it away—

Something catches your eye. 

It's a photograph. 

A younger version of Johnny, maybe. Shaded in black and white. He's barefaced, too. Beard shaved down to a thin dusting of stubble, an odd sight compared to the thick tangle of hair you're so used to seeing on him. His hair, too.

A mohawk. The shorn sides cropped as close to the skin as he could get. The top coiffed and styled for the photo. His asymmetrical hairstyle makes sense now. You trail your finger down the slope of his jaw.

You deep an indent underneath. Ink pressed tight to the thin page, bubbling up from below. You tuck the photo of him, all cocksure and rough around the edges, back into the seam before turning the page.

And it doesn't make sense. Not at first. A series of small sketches cover the page, littered across it like small pondstones leading to the bottom. Nahanni, you know. Recognise the magesty of this gorgeous park. You follow the trail, thinking distantly of your old art teacher in school and the magnetism of the gaze, and—

The bottom is a black circle. Needlepoints cutting through the curves. Sitting in the centre is woman. She sits in the valley watching a moose graze at the bottom of knoll, and in her hand sits an apple—