J.O.I.'s father's garage monologue — "I don’t know what I slipped…"
I don’t know what I slipped on, son. There were spiders well-known to infest the palms’ fronds all along the courts’ fences. They come down at night on threads, bulbous, flexing. I’m thinking it could have been a bulbous goo-filled widow I stepped and slipped on, Jim, a spider, a mad rogue spider come down on its thread into the shade, flabby and crawling, or that leapt suicidally right from an overhanging frond onto the court […] I’m thinking it could have been either a daytime latrodectus or some pus from a frond. The wind blew cruddy pus from the webbed fronds onto the court, maybe, up near the net. Either way. Something poisonous or infected, at any rate, unexpected and slick.
Context
At the exact crux of the life-defining memory sits a hole — "I don't know what I slipped on" — and twenty-seven years of forensic confabulation poured into it, "maybe" and "could have been" elaborated into near-certainty. Recall's gaps don't stay empty; they get filled with whatever the rememberer needs (here: a foreign body, anything but his own).