SG-1: Untitled
Notes: written for figoo, based on the prompt: "Tutankhamen, rubber-duck, shoelace, lipstick, glue."
Date: January 2005
Daniel's first memory is heat, a hot bright glare of sunlight off his mother's glasses, the smell of some unidentifiable meat burning over a camp-fire. He thinks he was maybe two years old at the time, already in love with the color of Egyptian sunlight. When he cleaned out Nick's house, he found old pictures of his mother scaling old ruins, a baby tied to her back with long strips of dust-colored cloth.
He's taken courses from professors who remembered his parents, and all the embarrassing stories that he would have learned as a young man, he’s found out second-hand. His first word was some garbled version of "Tutankhamen," his first pacifier a shard of pottery, his first step took him across the stones of the temple that crushed his parents.
He has other memories of his parents, implacable and fractured. A reception celebrating a new exhibit, a ring of coral lipstick on a champagne flute, crawling under the table by father's feet, tying and untying his shoelaces: clove-hitch, half-hitch, slipknot. His first real bath in a bathtub, a hotel in Cairo, playing with the rubber-duck that he'd gotten as a gift from one of his mother's more eccentric colleagues. The cook and the workers from the dig sites, the strange and untranslatable jokes they used to tell at night.
He has so few things left: his mother's wedding dress, hand-woven cotton worn frail and soft with time; a handful of old photographs and journal articles; his parents' field journals, yellowed with age, Arabic newspaper clippings held in place by crumbling glue. So few things.
He's lived things he never thought possible, been places only an handful of people know about, lived light years from where he was born. All the amazing things to learn about history, the universe, and humanity at his fingertips. Every once in a while, now, he misses Egypt, where he could squint into the sunlight and his mother's face there.
Date: January 2005
Daniel's first memory is heat, a hot bright glare of sunlight off his mother's glasses, the smell of some unidentifiable meat burning over a camp-fire. He thinks he was maybe two years old at the time, already in love with the color of Egyptian sunlight. When he cleaned out Nick's house, he found old pictures of his mother scaling old ruins, a baby tied to her back with long strips of dust-colored cloth.
He's taken courses from professors who remembered his parents, and all the embarrassing stories that he would have learned as a young man, he’s found out second-hand. His first word was some garbled version of "Tutankhamen," his first pacifier a shard of pottery, his first step took him across the stones of the temple that crushed his parents.
He has other memories of his parents, implacable and fractured. A reception celebrating a new exhibit, a ring of coral lipstick on a champagne flute, crawling under the table by father's feet, tying and untying his shoelaces: clove-hitch, half-hitch, slipknot. His first real bath in a bathtub, a hotel in Cairo, playing with the rubber-duck that he'd gotten as a gift from one of his mother's more eccentric colleagues. The cook and the workers from the dig sites, the strange and untranslatable jokes they used to tell at night.
He has so few things left: his mother's wedding dress, hand-woven cotton worn frail and soft with time; a handful of old photographs and journal articles; his parents' field journals, yellowed with age, Arabic newspaper clippings held in place by crumbling glue. So few things.
He's lived things he never thought possible, been places only an handful of people know about, lived light years from where he was born. All the amazing things to learn about history, the universe, and humanity at his fingertips. Every once in a while, now, he misses Egypt, where he could squint into the sunlight and his mother's face there.