But it was only a second.
Before I could ask him what had happened, he charged at me. My prominent bones—invited to the surface of my skin by lack of nutrition, tried to pierce through my dermis as I took the deepest breath, bracing myself for a crippling impact.
The wind was knocked out of me with a heavy, brutal force. I fell back to the floor, following my jaw’s collision with my father’s mammoth fist. I thanked God above for the extra weight my father carried, because as crazy as it sounded, it cushioned the blow to my stomach that came next, which had a mixture of blood and vomit rushing to my open lips as I gasped for breath.
“Calm already, boy?” my father sneered, dragging me from the ground by my throat until our noses touched.
The pain near my larynx taunted it would kill me. The mint he’d swallowed on the way home did little to hide the fact he’d been drinking as his heavy, angry breaths pounded into my face.
He hocked phlegm from his cigar-stained lungs and spat it in my face.
It almost turned me sick, but I ignored the urge, doing nothing but allowing the mess on my face to drop to the carpet of the same color.
“No wonder she fucking hates you. I guess now she has a real reason, huh!”
“What did he do?” I found the strengthto ask, forcing the words past his tight grip.
But that was all I had strength for.
He dropped me onto my bleeding feet a second before he granted me the relief of being off them again by punching me in the face and knocking me back to the ground.
“Stop,” I begged, for his safety, not mine. “Please, stop. You know what will happen.”
“Oh, I sure do. I’m counting on it. . . now that it’s just me and you.”…and the false courage gifted by the vodka he’d been drinking.
He kicked hard into my stomach. And then my face. My nose felt like it exploded under his dirty, heavy boot.
A damp red patch spread across the carpet, my DNA digging its own grave in the brown ground that mimicked dirty soil.
I pushed myself up, my fingers sinking into the fibers. My pain stunted my speed, but my father’s foot assisted me, lifting me from the ground when it, again, booted into my hungry stomach. His force, so violent, it almost had his thick yellow toenails stabbing through his boots and my skin. . . and I’d have welcomed the disgusting death; an end to my misery and the misery I brought the both of my parents.
“Please, stop,” I tried once more, tears falling from my eyes.
“You have the cheek to ask that after what happened to your mother, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean? Is Momma okay?” He didn’t answer me. “Please,” I begged from my lowly position. “Please, tell me if she’s okay?”
Hell wouldn’t have cared. He’d have been happy for her to be rotting in a shallow grave, but I didn’t feel that way.
“Did he hurt her?” I tried again.
He ignored my question, his heavy boot smashing into my face. My hand rushed to my nose, now surely broken; my blood gushed from the wound.
“You’ll bring him back,” I warned, floating between alertness and unconsciousness. My head shook—along with the rest of my body—worsening my headache and blurring my vision.
My father dropped to my side, his knees clicking violently as he bent. He wrapped his fist in my hair, dragging my eyes to his. “As I said, I’m counting on it, boy. Tonight, we are going to teach you how tochannel your fucking anger. I didn’t spend fifty grand on a whore for nothing!”
He slammed my head to the floor, and his words spun, replaying in my ears, louder and louder, but I didn’t have time to register them. Back on his feet, he kicked me again. And again and again and again.
I felt nothing but pain.
I couldn’t feel my father’s rage—the kind he only ever had for me, and only ever after a bottle of vodka.
And then, I felt different. . .
I felt the change; I felt nothing. . . my emotions went blank. My sensors became ignorant of my pain.
I become someone else. . . the darker part of my soul. He was back, and despite trying with all in my power to hold him back—keeping him in the darkest part of the soul we shared—I couldn’t. He took over.
