Excerpt: Unknown as of Yet

My dad likes to tell me about the story about the first time he ever laid eyes on my mom. She wasn’t blonde and tanned like other Californian girls. No, when he first saw her, she looked to be about eighteen, had her dark brown hair buzz-cut to about an inch long and was wearing a black coverall jumpsuit and black cat-eye glasses. With her was a guy about the same age. He had a pompadour hairstyle and he was sporting black dress pants and a black leather jacket. The two were standing around in an exceedingly normal manner such that dad wouldn’t have noticed them at all were it not for the fact that my mother then handed the guy a sledgehammer and an object that looked like a cassette tape. He took the object, put it on the ground and proceeded to smash it to pieces with the aforementioned sledgehammer with great gusto. When he was done, he wiped his brow, my mother unzipped a pocket of her jumpsuit, removed a small dust broom, handed it to him and smiled. My dad never tells me where things went after that, or how they began dating. He claims those stories aren’t nearly as interesting.
She’s pretty, my mom. She has violet eyes and straight, dark brown hair, both traits she graciously bestowed upon me, though dad gave me his curls and his freckles. Now, in reference to my mom, I expect everyone but me is using the past tense. See, my mom disappeared when I was ten. She went into the Redwood forest near my house and never came out. My dad says it’s finally time for me to grow up, stop daydreaming and accept that she is…dead. Even now, it’s hard to think that word.
Before she left, my mom always told me to never let anyone convince me that I was too old to believe in something. Well mom, I’m the only one still saying you’re alive. Don’t make us both out to be fools…