the steve with no name (part 4)

steve pulled himself from his thoughts and returned to the office he was currently pretending to do work in. the game of solitaire he was halfway through had suddenly lost its appeal with thoughts of accidentally killing his parents, and he decided to take the rest of the day off by building a little fort under his desk and trying to decide what he was actually going to do about everything. 

surely there must be someone still alive who could recall his actual name?

he seemed to remember the last living person who might have known would have been his aunty meryl, who had had the misfortune to die 13 years previously. unfortunately, this wasn’t much use to steve - or indeed to poor aunty meryl - and at her subsequent funeral, the only thing he could think of was how out of the blue it had all seemed and how he wished he had visited her a bit more in the 96 years leading up to her untimely death.

he also strangely seemed to remember thinking that the priest holding the sermon bore a striking resemblance to a picture he had once drawn when he was 8 years old. the picture had been that of a dog eating an ice cream and doing a cartwheel, which steve had been very proud of at the time, and had kept trying to hang on the family fridge despite his parents constantly taking it down again.

as it turned out, the unfortunate positioning of the dog’s tail had made it appear somewhat more 'phallic' than his parents felt comfortable with, and the resulting drips of ice cream the dog held had opened the picture up to an entirely more risqué interpretation than the one steve had innocently intended. but all of this was a little bit too much to explain to an 8 year old, so both parents had agreed that it was probably easier to carry on letting him think they just hated him as an artist: so that’s exactly what they had done, and steve had not drawn a dog or an ice cream since.