A crimson, beat-up face lingers beneath the cherry of a lit cigarette.
I guide my eyes to where a blade of moonlight spears through the thin, ripped and dirty drape at the side, landing on the gun positioned in the center of the rickety kitchen table.
It’s still spinning, round and round, until he slams his palm over it, cutting the whirring sound clean off.
My father rests back in the flimsy chair. His knees are wide beneath the scarred trestle table, his arm extended, hand wrapped casually around the gun, finger on the trigger.
He wets his lips, drags his wrist beneath his nose.
“Not man enough to do it yourself, you had to get someone else to do it for ya, boy?”
I take a deep breath and hold it in my lungs for a very long time.
My Vans squeak when I take a step into the kitchen, toward the man that had never had the privilege of the title‘father.’
The kitchen counter cuts into my lower back when I lean against it, crossing my arms over my chest, my feet at my ankles, lifting my chin.
I suck on my front teeth, swallow my rage down, and work to not let evil win. However, I feel my body stretching against me.
“You wanna tell me why your daughter was just murdered, brutally, I might add, and all you’re worried about is the fact that you got your ass beat?” My voice is quiet, yet hard, and there's a beat of silence before he laughs.
He. Fucking. Laughs.
I take another deep breath, feel the world contract and expand around me.
It seems the catastrophe of losing hischildhadn’t so much as scraped his hard edges.
It made me fucking sick because it was confirmation that the man in front of me only cared about one thing, and that washis pride, and the permanent bruise that had set in stone around it after meeting Skinner’s pummeling fists.
My throat tightens, my fists too, along with my spine, and I shove away from the counter, moving toward him.
However, I only take two paces before the soft and trembling hands of my mother’s wrap around my forearm, then my bicep, her thumbs brushing across my skin.
She tries to pull me back, and when I glance over my shoulder toward her, I wish I never had.
All of the blood in my body rushes to my head, my pupils shake.
I want to scratch at my eyes. I want to tear them from their sockets. I want to take away their ability to see, because the grim sight staring back at me is a haunted memory I had pushed away and buried at fifteen.
I rip my arm from my mother’s hold, pace toward my father.
“What the fuck did you do to her!?” I shout, throwing my arm behind me, toward my mother. The woman that he’d so obviously dragged and left at death's door.
Cigarette marks are burned deep into her bony chest, and she’s sporting bruised eyes that had been forced shut.
He shrugs like none of this, his abuse, his volatile beatings, mean anything at all.
“That cunt…” It takes everything inside of me not to reach for the gun and put a bullet between his eyes. “Should have taught her daughter not to be a desperate whore.”
I’m shaking my head, sucking on my front teeth as I stare at the vile garbage sitting beneath me.
“What, you think what happened to Jade washerfault? You thinksheasked for this?”
He laughs again, wets his lips, screws his nose. “That was all your mother’s doing,” he sings the words out.
I can barely breathe. Can hardly speak, finding only enough voice to say, “You never deserved to hear her call youDad.”
He sniffs, chin to his chest, eyes on the pistol. “Yeah, and you think you deserved to be herbrother?” He scoffs. “Weak-ass no son of mine.” Jerking his chin toward my mother. “You’re just like her.”
