Glenn's Letter is the email Jeff sent to UnFiction Forum user grieck on June 3, 2011. It deals with the death of Jeff and Alex's parents.
Transcript[]
Hello Glenn,
I hope all is well. I've finally managed to find some time to finish this up this letter, in response to your message a few weeks ago. I understand that you may have felt... awkward being so blunt with me, but honestly, I appreciate it. People, we're so fucking evasive today, we can't ever fucking give a straight answer, eh? I'm sorry for how long it took me to finally write this all out, but as you can imagine, I didn't know how to properly relay this to you. Let me begin.
My parents died last year.
It was a Thursday evening and my brother had music lessons at the shop. That week, it had been raining every day - up until about five pm that evening, and my parents decided that we should go out for dinner after Alex's lessons. We were going to go to Sticky Wicket's (Hamilton), for what its(sic) worth. That damn place was their favorite. Ha. Now, my brother wasn't getting out of his practice until about eight, so it was going to be a relatively late dinner, but hell, it didn't really matter to me. We're the group of kids who frequent Haven after three am, after all. My parents offered to "go for a ride" before getting Alex, considering the newly-pleasant weather. I declined. I sat inside on that beautiful evening and edited a damn video.
Alex called me around 8.20 wondering where mom and dad were. I sure as hell didn't know. I took my car and picked Alex up and waited at home with him. I made him a frozen dinner to hold him off. Maybe my parents ran into some old friends, got caught up. Something like that.
Their car broke the guardrail and plunged into Crosswicks Creek. They (the police) couldn't retrieve their bodies promptly enough, but the police believe that they hit a deer or some decently-sized animal and lost control of the car. They discovered that the windshield was shattered after they surfaced the wreck; they could have potentially survived and escaped. They must have fucking died on impact and never had the chance to climb out of the sinking vehicle.
My brother refused to believe it, days, weeks, months, after the accident, after countless police consultations and psychiatric evaluations.
You know us: we love terrible indie-bands. As you may have recently seen, Alex plays small shows with his friends at the music lessons every so often. They wanted to "expand their [musical] horizons" and mess around with "alternative sounds." My brother wanted to emulate bands like Animal Collective and just have everyday-nonsense synced to miscellaneous beats.
He had randomly begun to record sound clips of my family in their daily routine, at dinner, watching TV, greeting each other, etc. etc. My parents got a kick out of it at the time. When we finally got the call that night, he was messing around with the treble levels in my dad's response to the doorbell. I could only guess how many other recordings he still has.
I didn't take solace in our beloved community at the time because, well, fuck: you guys didn't exist yet. We didn't have true "HYBRIDs," we had people bitching about the poor sightings of the suit in our early videos. I wasn't going to vent to a bunch of quasi-strangers. So here it is.
Thanks, Glenn. I know it doesn't really explain much. But that's what happened to my family. Of course it was devastating. But I have a brother to look after. And I can't let myself become too human.
Jeffrey
Notes[]
Continuity error -