A lone bare light bulb burns above our heads. The room is filled with old magazines, dirty mugs and dishes, forks caked with weeks-old food. Empty cans and take-out boxes are strewn about the table and countertops. The floor is littered with scraps of paper, crumbs, dust and debris. In one corner there is an old bandage with dried spots of blood and pus.
"So how have you been?," he asks in a guarded, distant voice. He looks much weaker and frailer than I can ever remember. As he rises from his seat, he glances at me sideways up to my neck but avoids my eyes as he always has.
"Fine, fine, " I utter knowing full well he isn't really interested. It nauseates me to think that this was our home once. My home! Growing up with little but the necessities of life and maybe the occasional splurge on a new Matchbox car or bag of plastic soldiers to amuse myself. Perhaps he wanted me to stay off the streets. "Keep your head in the game, kid," he'd say.
"Okay then," a barely imperceptible moving of his lips. He walks past me with a slight wave of the hand into the parlor then drops slowly into that worn, dusty old armchair he's had forever. It creaks like old bones being realigned by force of nature, gravity. The tv goes on and I disappear.
It's not like I didn't feel loved a few moments of my life there. There was the day he threw me down the stairs then raced after me, two steps at a time to make sure he didn't kill me. "Geez, I get so angry, I didn't mean to make you lose your balance. Is that blood on your head?" A trickle stings my eye. He brushes it away. "Go get a rag and soak it with warm water. It's not that bad. Man up!" A note of tenderness in his voice, maybe even a hint of admiration that I was strong enough to fall so far and yet be awake, breathing. "Now go out and play."
I suppose he was proud of me once or twice too. I did well in school, I studied, worked hard. He knew I had a brain, maybe he feared it to some extent. Perhaps he should.
It all started several years back. At first, it was just small animals, BB guns, torturing insects with matches. They seemed so helpless I just couldn't look away. The frequency increased and I began to prefer the company of my little suffering friends to others. My relationships beyond him vanished with each act. After a while it got so I couldn't speak out loud for fear of being ridiculed, my secrets branded on my forehead like the scrawlings of a madman in an asylum. Working was beyond difficult but my job proofreading allowed me the opportunity to be as anti-social as I pleased. I was left alone for the most part, maybe even avoided but I simply did not care.
I stand alone in my old room. I leave the light off. It's all stacks of old books and magazines, my old bed a repository for old clothes he will never wear. Mostly I see silhouettes illuminated only by the old streetlamp next to the alleyway where my head laid on the pillow when those first thoughts began to creep into my consciousness. It was the logical progression. I conceived of nothing specific but the dread emotional state and cold demeanor it would require.
The tv is so loud now it's rattling the window panes looser, a chill blowing through the gaps in the pin nails and putty he uses to keep the glass contained in the ever contracting wood. It's almost comical, his so-called ingenuity. As a child I would pacify him with gloating praise for the way his mind worked, his diligence. Jack of all trades, master of none. That was his true mantra. For me, I wanted to do just one thing better than anyone, especially him. My craft would be the envy of the diabolical. Even he would have to admire me. For I would be better, more proficient, more calculating than anyone else had ever been.
The first one wasn't easy. There was noise, struggle, a remarkably unhinged response that I hadn't anticipated but I struck and struck quickly and repeatedly with more strength and tenacity than I had ever imagined I could possess. I dug deep and grasped with an unrelenting sense of power and then it snapped. Release. I was a little worse for the wear but I was successful in my endeavor. My hands were filthy but that washes away.
"Are you alright in there? Hungry? Did you eat?" he bellows from the other room.
"Nah, I'm good."
He always used to call me fat as a kid. Our junk food diet didn't help but he always said he couldn't afford the healthier stuff. I was to eat what he bought and like it. I had no input. I suppose I preferred it that way. I was forever hungering for something more substantial, more nourishing. It fueled me onward.
Each successive one was performed with more ease and proficiency than the previous. It got so it was almost reflexive. A passing shadow would set me off into a series of actions I completed with a virtuosity and rapidity that would make the head spin. I was gifted and I knew it. And all I wanted was more.
But here I was stifled. Deep down inside I knew what I needed to do. Why was it so difficult now? Here we both were. I remembered the story from school, "In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day." My hands began to shake. This never happened! I seized my swirling head and looked into the old mirror on the wall across from my bed. I avoided it most of my young life. Now, in the darkness, all I could see were the contours of a face I hated even more than his. Trapped inside this body, a scared and lonely child. Where was the rage? I turned away from my reflection to gather myself.
This would be the last time, I promised myself. Everything up to now had been a morbid rehearsal for this moment, honing my skills, dulling my remorse. The time was now. But then one last memory seized my brain before I turned for the door. From outside the window where my childhood passed, I heard the horn of a distant train and it took me back to that night outside the hospital, waiting in the car while he visited his dying father. I remember hearing this very same sound that cool fall evening with all the car windows rolled down and it struck me. This man's life passes but the train keeps moving on, noting its defiance with each blow. The world ignores his death. It doesn't mourn for him.
A breath. I hear the metallic click of the switch but my body refuses to react, reflex. A slight prick and the flash of a hand beneath my eyes and across my neck, the blade catching a faint spark from the streetlight. For a split second I can see directly into his eyes. A single teardrop falls down my cheek and then silence, freedom, peace. It's dark.
© 2010 Paul Caracciolo. Reproduction in whole or in part is strictly prohibited.
