I didn’t want to. I wanted to smash the glass coffee table, hurl the bottle at my father’s head and watch it burst, see the old man’s skull finally crack and spill out the rot.
But I moved closer, step by step.
“Sit down,” my father said, gesturing vaguely at the threadbare armchair across from the couch. I sat, but only at the edge, my body coiled and ready to spring.
My father watched me for a long minute. “You been fighting again?” he finally asked, eyes narrowing. “Heard from the school. You got a problem with authority, boy, and it’s gonna get you fucked up real good some day.”
My jaw clicked as I clenched it. “Don’t see what it matters to you,” I said, my voice flat. “You’re passed out most days, anyway.”
The old man laughed, a dry, wet sound. “You’re a smartass. You think I don’t see? I see everything.”
He levered himself upright, and fora second I watched the struggle.
He lurched forward, bracing his elbows on his knees so our faces nearly matched, the stench of vodka and rotted teeth an assault all its own. “You wanna be a man, you gotta learn how to take a hit,” my father said, slapping a meaty palm against my cheek, “and keep standing. You keep folding up like tissue paper, you’ll end up nothing but a stain on the floor.”
“I don’t fold,” I whispered, my voice so thin it almost vanished between us.
“Could’ve fooled me,” he said, wagging his head. “You get that from your bitch of a mother. She ran, and now you run too. You can’t even hit back when a man comes at you.” He leaned in and spat the words. “If you want to stop being a disappointment, you gotta start hurting people for real. You gotta finish what you start, boy.”
I didn’t blink. I just stared at his ruined face, every bad decision and old bruise mapped into folds of skin, and saw my own future. Saw that this would be my inheritance, unless I found a way to burn the lineage to ash.
The urge to strike him was tidal, but I kept it coiled inside. Someday, I promised myself. Someday.
“Go to your room,” my father finally spat, dismissing me like an animal. “And keep your goddamn mouth shut.”
I did, moving through the hall with the stealth of a hunted thing, every sense tuned to the creaks and groans of the house.
I locked myself inside my room, and lay on the bed, my hands folded on my chest like a corpse in a casket.
I kept my eyes open, staring up at the sawtooth cracks in the plaster until my neck ached, until the sting of my father’s slap simmered down to a numb afterglow.
Sleep was a last resort, a submission I tried to delay as long as possible, because I knew what would wait for me there. The old reruns, the memory loops, my mother’s back dissolving into fog as she walked away from the house, the blood-warm taste of my own teeth after a bad night, the way Amelia’s eyes looked before she started crying.
Always Amelia, even when I tried to knock her out of my head with fists and venom. It was like a sick addiction.
I pressed the heel of my palm into my eye socket, as if I couldmash her image into a pulp and wring it out through my tear ducts. I almost wished she’d fight back, that she’d snap one day and cut me open with a few sharp syllables in front of everyone.
But she always just took it, absorbed the blows like a black sponge, and that made me want to peel her skin off and see what she’d look like underneath.
I hated the needing most of all. The sick, pathetic hunger that craved her eyes on me, even if they were full of contempt or terror, because at least then they were real, and pointed at me, and not through me the way the world usually did.
I’d rather be despised than invisible.
I sat up in the darkness, every muscle in my arms and back rigid with a need I could not name. My hands, when I looked at them, were shaking.
Anger mingled with those thoughts, but hatred was easily blurred. Those feelings were born from something deeper, something pure. I didn’t dwell on it, though.
The two emotions blended, anger and Amelia, until they became one.
She made my blood boil. Her existence was a disease to my mind, infecting my bones, devouring me. Amelia was the bane of my heart, leading me into an abyss of agony. She haunted me.
Her innocence, her smile, her pain, her presence. She was a phantom in my shadow, lurking in my dreams.
It swallowed me entirely, until I was a rotting ghost.
THE PRESENT
AMELIA
