The Web Haunt of Ryan K Lindsay

This is the start of the story. Pretentious whiny crap, really. Enjoy.

Light.
One, two, three, four.
Sound.
The storm was four kilometres away.
This was the one trick Don could remember that he had learnt from his father. The face was hazy, the voice was soft and confidential, but the lesson was learned. Don couldn’t remember how old he was when that had happened. People always said that they could remember back when they were really young. Don thought they were full of shit. You might get glimpses, slight visions through cheesecloth, but you did not really remember. He must have been young though because his first actual memory was the day of his fourth birthday. He was out in the backyard playing with a yellow balloon. He hit the balloon up and it slowly sailed over the fence and back to the ground, out of sight. He couldn’t remember who was at his party, what he ate or what he got, but he remembered losing that balloon.
The balloon stood out like the sun in his hands and then it slowly, teasingly, disappeared. He remembered not knowing who lived next door, but knowing that he would not be allowed to go around there and ask for his balloon back. It was not the right thing to do. He had it and he had not appreciated it, so he had lost it. It was his first beautiful thing and his first beautiful thing lost. Two very important check boxes ticked within ten seconds of each other.
The only other certain memory from that day was that his father had not been present. At some stage between teaching Don to track storms by counting between the lightning and the thunder and Don counting the seconds before his holy balloon disappeared Fred Cameron had passed away. Don could not remember when. If you don’t remember when someone was there you certainly weren’t going to remember when they stopped being there.