I sat for a little while in the darkness of my room, giving up some valuable time as both a courtesy period and precautionary measure. It was not unusual for him to call me out of my room to engage me after I had gone to bed. He said he was virtually the same drunk as he was sober–but he only did this when he was drunk, which was most of the time. There was never any debate. Never an argument. It was always to inform me of some way I wronged him. And wasn’t it enough that I wronged his whole goddamned life? I was naught but a misfire into the woman who bore his daughter. Nobly, she would bear me as well. Less than a decade would pass before the ground would bear her.

She left the household completely under his control. His stompings, his bellows, his hardliquor stinking. But it was something lighter that filled his glass on that night. Cheap wine. It was the typical choice when Janet was over. I liked her as much as I could’ve liked any of my dad’s girlfriends. I still didn’t quite understand the conversation he and I had a couple months prior. I wonder now if he lit the bonfire just to lure me outside with him.

When the flames were rising high above the bundle of sticks he dropped into our half-sphere pit, he told me to pull my chair closer to his. He was uncharacteristically sober, but the darkness of the early summer night gave him all the anonymity he needed to be able to look me in the eyes. He told me something he assumed I already knew. He talked about a woman’s company and the holes my mom left in his heart. He said he was sure I felt them too. He paused and waited for me to confirm this. I didn’t understand the meaning of his words, but I nodded anyway. This gave him the assurance he needed to continue. He was a man, he said. With needs. He figured I would understand, but he wanted to get my approval anyway. He wanted to start dating again. 

For a moment, only the fire responded. I was shocked at this semblance of power he had placed in my lap. It felt like a piece of burning wood had been tonged from the fire and handed to me. It was agonizing to hold, and I felt as though my only option was to throw it away from me. The wood groaned in a small way and cracked much louder. The shadows played on his face; dancing fast and swaggering unevenly over his eyes’ desperate search. Of course, I said. My hands burned for a while after.

I met Janet soonafter. I also learned what a Virginia Slim was, and got to see how a more experienced person responded to the cold jabs of a narcissist sinking back into their own greatness. Even though Janet was also very timid, I learned a lot from watching the way she could deflect the superior sighs and outright put-downs. 

I had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that my mom’s attraction to this hulking ogre was not a fluke. Hulking. Tom Buchanan hated that word. I don’t know what my dad thought of it, but I know it was one of the omnipresent adjectives in my roomy skull when I was standing in the kitchen looking up at him. Or in the workshop. Or the deck. He never felt larger than one earlier night on the deck.

He hadn’t changed out of his robe all day, but the alcohol didn’t flow until a tasteful darkness had taken the sky. The porch lights were off, but the moon hung high and bright. I could see him across the small table of twisted and grated iron. The boards on the deck were almost as warped as the legs on the cold bottleperch. I attributed my sense of sea-sickness to the rocking of the table on these legs. It teetered sympathetically with every slight movement his huge body made. I felt as though I was clinging onto this unstable piece of scrap in an ocean of silence and darkness. 

I didn’t feel any better when he stood up. I heard his heavy steps fall behind me, so I rose from my chair and pivoted to face him. I followed his pacing at a comfortable distance for a while, aimless. At length, we started to speak. I forget what about, but it was something I felt I knew a lot about, as I was gesturing incessantly. He thought it was very funny. He started waving his own hands and kind of lunging down at me silently. He laughed when I stopped talking and said it was normal, but the laugh told me more. I felt stupid.

I forget how we got talking about mom after that. We always did. Perhaps the wind would blow and maybe the breeze’s attempt to move his thick hair would remind him of her pale fingers ran through it; her squishy red birthmark searching through a black wilderness. Maybe my mother spoke with her hands. 

He started telling me about how she had done it. I knew she did it in her new car, inside the garage of a house she was supposed to sell, but he told me why my sister was so worried before I ever knew anything was wrong. She was texting her the whole time. Her last words were not heard by any, they just appeared on a digital screen. You could turn the phone on and off a million times and they would still be there, just as she wrote them. Her last action could very well have been hitting send. 

I turned away from him with tears welling in my eyes, and suddenly he was behind me, around me, consuming me. I kicked my legs as he lifted me effortlessly into the air. I threw my head back into his shoulder and started to openly sob. Giving up, I slumped my whole upper body down, folding at his arms. Tears streamed down both our faces. I heard mine hit the new coat of paint on the old wooden boards below me. I felt his seep into my hair.

No, I said. No.

Yes, she did. Oh, God. She did.

At some point, I figured enough time had passed for me to leave unnoticed. I could hear him and Janet out on the deck, so I knew if I left through my window, I’d probably stumble right into him. If I opened the basement door to the outside, they’d hear its thick insulation rubber scrape against the concrete right under them. The front door and kitchen windows wouldn’t do for similar reasons. That left me one point of exit in the house. There were two windows in his big, empty room. They looked out into the yard from the wall closest to the side of the bed which she used to lay on. It had remained undepressed for over a year at this point. 

I slid the glass up on its gunky track and loosened the supports keeping the screen in place. I put my hands forwards and pushed against the screen with my fingertips. I felt each tiny square I touched push into my skin as the mesh started to bulge away from me. Then it gave out, and I heard it thud lightly on the grass. 

I slipped out and dragged the window down from outside. I tried to seal it as well as I could with what little grip I could get on the edge of the insulation. The locks wouldn’t be turned the right way, and if he examined it closely he would definitely notice the missing screen… but I knew he wouldn’t even get close to the locks tonight. He’d stumble into bed straight from the doorway, never passing his changed window.

I worried about him seeing the frame in the grass as he pulled out of the driveway in the morning, so I picked it up and brought it around to the side of the house. I left it propped up against the chipping red paint and told myself I would pick it up in the morning and put it back in its place before I left for school. 

After I turned the corner of the house again, I had a straight line to my friend Chris’s house. I was carrying his hoodie with me, which he had left at my house a couple weeks before when he fled from a sleepover we had. He had so much internalized homophobia that he said he “felt sick” after licking my cum off my stomach and guzzling another one of our friend’s. I guess I didn’t fare much better in that department either, though. Since he left the other friend and I alone, we put on Oliver Stone’s The Doors and I tried slipping my hand into his pants again. Just before I felt the tip of his cock, he started giggling, and I could feel his whole body jostling next to mine. He apologized and said he was ticklish. I said I didn’t want to do it anymore and turned away from him, leaving about an inch of space in between our pelvises. I ended up sleeping on the other side of the couch. 

This hoodie element made me feel a lot better about sneaking out of the house. I told myself I was on a mission. I felt like I had a real reason to be going out on this night. But… why? Why did I care? I never had a reason for my late-night excursions of pointless rebellion before. I didn’t have any reason for skipping school that day either, but I had done it anyway. What drove me that night was not any polite obligation to return a friend’s clothes, but rather a sort of cosmic aligning. This was where I got off the train. 

I had enough brains to duck behind our row of hedges after I had dashed across our yard, just in case my dad and Janet decided to migrate to the front of the deck. I was too full of adrenaline to check the road before I crossed, but when I reached the top of the hill on the opposite side of the street, I felt my feet sink into the ground. I turned around to look back at my house. Nobody on the porch. From afar, it looked very average. Painted red, A-frame, two cars in the driveway out front… we had all the makings of a normal family. Who fucked that up? 

My sister was already staying home on the day my mom killed herself, and I didn’t think it was very fair to send me to school with that information. I just tugged at my mom’s robe and pleaded gratingly until she said Fine, I don’t care. Stay home. I was elated. I rushed downstairs and booted up my PS4. I remember hearing the door open and close as she slipped out, and somewhere in my mind I can actually see her confronting the white haze of that morning… but no, I didn’t see her leave. I didn’t say goodbye. I wonder if she had already decided. 

I heard my dad laugh from afar, and felt the ground release me. Just as I put the house behind me, it started to rain. It came hard and fast, slanting with the wind to hit my face. I quickened my pace and found awkward footing down the hill into Chris’s backyard. By some stroke of luck, he was already sitting in his basement, and could see me approaching from the sliding glass door. 

“Here you go,” I said as he opened the door, shoving the hoodie inside.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, rubbing his head with one hand and reaching out with the other. “I forgot about this.” 

He looked sick, but invited me in anyway. He sat down clutching his hoodie, but I stayed by the door, fueled by a strong wanderlust. I asked what the plan was, and he looked back up at me as if I was haunting his house. After a moment of confusion, he started:

“Oh, well, I think Ava was gonna be at Daphne’s tonight.” As he paused, he shut his eyes softly and shook his head. “Dude, you should’ve seen us after you left. Ava went and got a bottle of whiskey from her house and we got drunk in my backyard!” 

I was barely paying attention to what he was saying. I was still hung up on the idea of going to Daphne’s house again. We had gone earlier that day, where I had met her for the first time. She was older than us–she had already graduated, I think–and lived with her mom on the other side of Middletown in the apartments by the primary school. Her mom was out, but she was reluctant to say where. She had a bearded dragon, and I asked if I could hug her while we walked in the grassy strip behind each glass door of the townhouses. Of course, she told me. She said she had issues with trusting men, but that she felt like I was different. Maybe because I was a boy.

For this, and my own grossly personal reasons, our relationship felt wholly preternatural. She was taller than me, and my face sank cheeklong into her breasts as she embraced me. We went inside and she did my makeup as Chris sat on the couch in her dark living room, and we talked about music. I didn’t know how Chris knew her, but I was glad he did. She knew who Jim Morrison was. She told me to stop smiling and look up as she put my blush on.

The thought of seeing her again was enough to send me back out into the rain for the trek across town that instant, but Chris rambled on about his drunkenness. 

“We were stumbling around and laughing… we had to chuck the bottle into the cornfield when my parents got home. You really should’ve stayed.”

I was looking out the glass. “Yeah, I’m sorry I missed it–” I turned back to him. “Do you think Ava’s already at Daphne’s?” 

“I dunno,” he shrugged. “Probably.”

I couldn’t contain my excitement or think of a smoother way to initiate our journey. “We should go now, then.” 

When we got outside, we were both using our arms to shield ourselves from the rain. It was coming down even harder than when I got there. We didn’t even hit the asphalt in front of his house before he said the weather was too bad to walk all the way across town. Some other time, he said. I was so immeasurably disappointed. I tried to press on, but he wouldn’t go; and despite Daphne and I’s hasty soul-bonding, I didn’t feel comfortable inviting myself into her house without our mutual friend present. She was part of a world I didn’t understand then, and she was a glimpse into it that will always hold in a very strange light: not quite close to my heart, but perhaps in a dark fold of my brain.

Chris and I were both pretty sick of each other after spending all day together, so I decided that if I wasn’t gonna see Daphne, I would just go home. We said goodbye and I watched him slump down onto his couch and put his head into his hands through the door. Then I started up the hill again.

It felt like my heart was wedged into a vice grip as I made my way down my long driveway. Both because of my intense pining for Daphne, and because I noticed something as I swayed between the anonymity of the hedges and the fearful nakedness of the gravel. I had to double back to get a better view before I understood how fucked I was. The light in his bedroom was on. 

It’s over, I thought. This is it. I’ll have bars on my windows and I’ll get all my meals on trays, slotted in through a food port. He’s already drunk, he has no time to stew on his. I’ll immediately feel the brunt of his unbridled anger. He was waiting for me to come through that window to start slow-clapping, or just to sigh as I fell on my face. What then? No. I wouldn’t give him that, yet. 

I pivoted and rushed down into the workshop. I closed the heavy side door behind me and flipped the lightswitch on. My whole life, I had grown up around smokers, and my whole life–whenever I’d ask why they sucked on that funny stick–I would hear that, yes, it was very bad for you, but it helped reduce stress. I needed that. 

My sister was one of the smokers in my life, of cigarettes and of weed. My parents knew about it for a long time. We had a camper parked perpetually in our yard for a couple of years, and it was eventually converted into a space for my sister and her friends. They had psychedelic posters on the wall, a big CRT TV in the corner with a Gamecube, a pulsing blue lightning lamp in the shape of a dolphin, and all the necessary paraphernalia for lighting up. She preferred a bong, but her boyfriend liked rolling, and some of her friends liked packing bowls. And I liked hanging around her when her friends were over. I felt more adult. I felt cool, even though I was sworn to not tell my friends at school. I wasn’t gaining anything from being around these dope-fiends except a sense that I knew more about life than my peers with their big, emptyfeeling houses. I would even try to flirt with some of my sister’s friends. For some reason, my presence was usually unnerving to them, and my sister would eventually tell me to run along with a flicking of her hand. 

When my dad decided to sell the camper, he felt enough sympathy for her to fix some pallets of wood to the corner of the shop and make a new space for her. I knew what it was, just as I knew what the camper was. This knowledge was dangerous when paired with my adoration for the heaviest abusers in ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll. I wanted to be Jim Morrison, self-destruction included. Self-destruction especially.

So what was stopping me? I had all the opportunity to partake that any white suburban pre-teen could hope for; but up until that point, I had never been brave enough to. Or maybe it just didn’t enter my mind as a reality. It was as far off of a fantasy as the Rock Star part of being Jim Morrison was. 

And fantasy is never that far off from reality. Well… I should say that dreams are not far off from reality. Dreams are just over the hump, waiting for some inspired dingbat to reach them somewhere off in the horizon. Dreams could be a few states away; only removed from our current situations by a couple of steps. Luck has nothing to do with it. I want you to skewer any fool who tells you that luck is any part of making your dreams come true. Luck is part of fame. If your dream is fame, you actually have a nightmare. 

Fantasy, on the other hand, is usually only one step removed from your happening life. Fantasy is a wish without faith. Yeah, it’d be pretty nice to live out your fantasy, but it would not be the best for anyone. Usually, living out a fantasy entails dropping significant aspects of your day-to-day life in exchange for the purely aesthetically pleasant or the wholly pleasurable. You’d need to hurt a lot of people before your fantasy merges with your reality. And what would become of yourself? It is only he who makes a beast of himself that gets rid of the pain of being a man.

What?

No matter.

On that night, multiple plains of my potential state of being copulated on a bed of Fate. Here I was, faced with a very simple equation: I was freaking out, I needed to calm down, and I had a cure right in front of me. If cigarettes helped one reduce stress, weed helped one actually relax, the way my sister explained it. A lesson every drug-curious person needs to learn in their life is that, yes, your user friend/family member will notice if a few ounces are missing. I had enough knowhow to use a grinder and pack a bowl, but not enough sense to realize that I would catch hell for it the next morning. It would be like trying to hoodwink my dad by refilling a bottle of Tito’s with water. That would’ve been even harder to get away with, partially because he typically drank the entire bottle before I could even think about sneaking some. 

I smoked out of a little pink elephant. It looked like a glass knickknack that had been hollowed out for this deviant purpose. I lit its ass on fire with a blowtorch and kissed its trunk. This was the part I had no clue about. I tried holding the smoke in my mouth and then just… letting it flow out after a second… but that didn’t feel right. So then I tried inhaling the smoke, and then inhaling deeper. This felt more correct. It also felt like I’d be on my way to becoming a proficient clarinet player. That is to say, I felt like a dork. Partially because I felt nothing at all. I could understand the concept that the drug needed time to take effect, but I didn’t have any time I was willing to waste. 

If I couldn’t relax, then I would try just reducing my stress. I opened my sister’s boyfriend’s pack of Newports and looked at all the rolled sticks like soldiers moving to their second conflict. They had lost some comrades in the course of the first battle, and they were about to lose another in the interim. He fell out of the helicopter and landed right into my hands. I picked up a lighter from the menagerie on the table and lit the end. 

I’ve tried to feel the presence of my mom as much as I can since she’s been gone. Proudly, I can say I resemble her more than Dear Ol’ Dad, and I try to lean into that when I can. I have to imagine that our resemblance peaked on that night in the smoker’s corner of the shop. I held the cigarette between two fingers, just as I had always seen her do, and even tried to cross my legs and assume her drag posture. I understood her better in that moment, I think. There was no taste like this in the world, and there was no feeling like tasting something that’s only ever existed for you as an aroma. There was also never such an intense feeling of sickness in my body. 

Guilt? No, I wouldn’t learn that feeling an hour or two later. Fear? Impossible. My stress was supposed to be reduced, dammit. But nothing could quell the feeling of illness climbing from my stomach. I was surely going to vomit, but I’d be damned if I left a big organic pile of evidence right here at the scene of my crime. I started up like I heard a pistol and pushed my full weight against the door, and as soon as it gave way, and lurched over to aim into the grass. 

“There she is!” 

I heard him and Janet laughing from the deck, then I looked up and saw them, his dark blue robe just a more flowing darkness obscured by the hanging roof, flowing as he shifted. They thought I was my sister at first, but I could feel his eyes on me, adjusting to the darkness. I didn’t feel like I had to vomit anymore. 

I ran back inside and put everything back where I found it. I don’t know why I expected that to help me, but I thought I could make a case for myself that I had come down there for… what reason? What excuse could I possibly think of? I looked up, hoping for some holy light to reign down and smite him before he reached the door. That was when I noticed the huge window mounted just below the edge of the roof. They knew I was here the whole time. I kept my head down and waited. 

I later learned that my feeling of sickness was just an intense nicotine buzz coursing through my seventy-pound, twelve-year-old body. I also later learned that if I had waited just a few more minutes, I wouldn’t have felt the need to smoke that cigarette. I was getting high– that revelation came to me a couple years later when the same feeling I had that night returned to me, heralding many tears and my title of “Downer.”

My vision darkened and returned multiple times in the matter of a second. I felt as if I was dozing off and regaining consciousness over and over again. I don’t remember the door opening, but then he was there, his dark robe swallowing his massive body and the industrial light from above. I don’t remember everything he said, just that I needed to go to the bathroom and scrub my nail polish off and that he would sell my guitars. I don’t remember him pulling his hand back, but I got hit. I don’t remember slamming my head against the floor, but I remember my cheek against the concrete.

This was quite sobering. My body knew I needed to get straight fucking quick. This was life or death, for chrissakes. Here I was, emaciated and high in front of a raging gorilla of a man. At that point he was well over two-hundred-fifty pounds, and he still stood a couple inches higher than me. 

He was always fat, even if his beer-belly hadn’t always been quite so huge; but I can recall one instance where he seemed as thin as a twig, and as fragile as wet paper. We didn’t know where she was for a long time. She was a missing person for a few hours. We all convened at my Nan’s house that evening: the immediate family, the grandparents, some family friends. She was probably just stuck on the side of the road somewhere, and her phone was out of battery. I remember how much I liked the sound of that. It’s the only explanation I remember, because it’s the only one that made sense to me. It was so logical that it felt real. The police were looking for her, I was told. I imagined her walking through the front door with a blanket draped over her shoulders, flanked by officers and looking embarrassed. I can still imagine it.

The day failed and there were still no answers. We couldn’t spend the night at Nan’s. I guess it would have felt too serious then. My sister, dad, and I were all back home when the police came. We had huddled into the master bedroom and tried to rest up in a pile of warm, worrying bodies. The knock sounded, and we all knew what it was about. Dad got up, and told us to wait. I remember my sister, who had been so anxious this whole time, looking me in the eyes and telling me that it would be okay. Her voice was shaky, her face was quivering. I don’t remember her words, but I remember my dad’s face when he walked through the bedroom door. 

There was a luminescent paleness behind his dark complexion, like you could see the smoke from a snuffed flame through the tinted glass of his skin. He wouldn’t look at us straight on as he spoke. “There are police officers here, they want to talk to you.” He was whispering. It sounded like he had been punched under the ribs. My sister protested. She wouldn’t go out into the living room until he told us where mom was, which meant I wouldn’t go either. 

“She committed suicide.” 

I’ll never forget the sound of my sister’s wail. I’ll never forget how tall the officers looked. I’ll never forget how the priest seemed plucked directly off a TV show. I’ll never forget the touch of the envelope finding my hands. I’ll never forget the anger that twinged me seeing that it was already torn open. I’ll never forget not being able to comprehend the words inside. Never.

Only a little over a year later, the man standing before me was not my kin. It was a stranger that I had gotten to know over my childhood of domestic instability. The drink flooded my father out of his body–if he even remained in that husk after my mom died. If he had been clinging to a branch somewhere alone in the vast ocean William Thomas Gorman kept dammed in his soul, he was now swept up completely, gone with the high-tide. 

He was mocking me as I stumbled back and fell against the dresser my sister stored all her materials in. “Eeeugh, I’m so fucked up! I can’t even stand up!” He was waving his hands again. I rose, the notches in my spine sliding against the protruding wood behind me. I lunged forward with my skinny, balled fist and landed it against his fat lips. It felt like punching a tub of wax, and probably achieved about as much. I backed away from him like a coiling snake, feeling around me for anything I could grab. I felt the back of a folding chair and hoisted it off the ground.

“Oh, yeah! WWE, pick up the chair!” He was laughing. My blood coated my face from an open wound somewhere that had been smeared by his lashing hand. He laughed. I threw that metal fucker across the room with as much force as my little stick arms could muster. He stopped laughing when it collided with his mushy skull.

He advanced with the hulking stomps of a teetering freight truck carriage after the driver took a risky turn. He grabbed me by my throat and slammed my head against the wall. Then, I felt the top of my skull touch the ceiling of the box. When the police questioned him about his side of this fantastic story the child psychologist had gotten out of me, they asked how high he held me as he choked me. He told them, “As high as I could.”

I don’t remember how my shirt and hoodie came off, but I think they were on the floor at this point. The hoodie was green, but had thin orange stripes through its whole length. It didn’t keep me particularly warm because of how thin it was, but it was very comforting to me then. It was a hand-me-down from my best friend. I never went back into the shop to get it after he carried me out.

I was slung over his shoulder, half naked, as he marched back into the house. I remember the cold, harsh luminance spilling on the deck from the porch light and Janet’s voice crying out when she saw me.

“Willy!” she gasped.

“Get out of my way, Janet,” was all he said. He shouldered past her and stomped all the way through to the other end of the house, stopping just short of the master bedroom. I raised my head a little and noticed that the light was off now.

He went into my sister’s room and flicked the light on. She was still asleep when he slammed me on top of her. Then she woke up. 

He would slap her in quick bursts, giving her his palm, then the back of his hand, then his palm, and so on. It was just to wake her up at first, but then he used it as an interrogation technique. He was convinced that she was the one supplying me with weed. I guess I should be flattered he didn’t take me for a thief. I kept my head back against her pillows while she cried, probably getting blood on them. I started to close my eyes. I felt so far removed from the situation, even though his fury had only been redirected to my right. 

It wasn’t long before he moved back to me. He wasn’t getting the information out of my sister that he wanted, so he gave me the same palm/backhand maneuver and asked me how long I’d been smoking.

“Just tonight!” I choked out.

Palm, backhand. “Bullshit!”

I wisened up quickly. “A month.” I said.

“Is that the truth?” He started to rise away from the bed, where he had been hunched over us.

“It’s what you want to hear.” 

This seemed to give him pause. He walked over to my sister’s mirror, and I let my head fall back to the bed. Looking down through my nose, I could see him stretch his lip out with his hand. He turned back to me.

“My lip is bleeding!”

I raised my head again, my face souring. I didn’t know what to say. How could this big hulking fuck look down at his blood-coated twelve-year-old’s face and complain about a busted lip. “Why do you think your lip is bleeding?” is all I could think to ask.

He turned back to the mirror, as if to check that it actually was bleeding. His resolve increased by this confirmation, he turned back to me and pointed to his face. “Look at it!”

I looked. “Why do you think I made it bleed?”

He turned away again, hesitated in the mirror, then made for the door. 

Janet, who had apparently been standing just outside, stepped in as he left. “Oh, your face…” she said. She stepped out to wet a rag and came back in and dabbed my face with it. I looked down in her hands and realized how much I was bleeding. There was a thick circle taking up the whole center of the handtowel. This filled my entire little body with anger.

“Janet, call the cops.” I said it clearly, looking straight ahead into my sister’s closet. But Janet didn’t want to. Rather, she said that I didn’t want that. My sister agreed. But I knew what I wanted.

I guess I was just in a pessimistic mood, because after Janet went to find my dad, my sister dressed me in an old gymshirt of hers and turned the lights off. “Let’s just sleep,” she said. “Let’s just go to sleep.”

I don’t know how long she held me in the dark, blood and tears mixing on her pillows, but I know it wasn’t long enough for either of us to fall asleep. I think even if he hadn’t come back and I had the whole night to tire, I still wouldn’t have been able to sleep in that house. But he did come back, so fuck any hypotheticals about a different life. 

He threw the switch on the wall again and started up his rage again like a roaring engine. He flung his hand out to point at my sister, but in the process opened his robe. I remember that second of vulnerability very well. I can still freezeframe the second before he realized, when his arm was outstretched and his cock was fully visible. This picture of nakedness, of inferiority; the shrunken head hiding among a bush of pubic hair. He was Napoleon then, and I’ll always remember him a little shorter than he actually was.

Is. We’re not that fortunate yet. 

He was totally incredulous now, still convinced that my sister had been my supplier. He ordered her out of the house, and told her to start packing. With one hand, she grabbed her neon Nike duffel bag, and with the other, she called her boyfriend. Halfway through asking him to come pick us up, my father took the phone out of her hand and CRASH! It was nothing but a pile of glass and hardware on the floor. She hurried her packing, but he was looming over her the whole time, screaming the pointless, repetitive gibberish of a cornered neanderthal. 

Then we were climbing into Janet’s car. I had on an untied pair of my sister’s old shoes. He had been a little ahead of us, and was just reemerging from the shop as we sat down. We heard glass shatter on the concrete as he smashed her bongs, and he was laughing again.

We spent the night at Janet’s mom’s house. My sister was able to dial her boyfriend and let him know that we were safe. We were laying no more than a foot apart in the guest bed. I could hear him screaming about what a stupid fuck I was for causing all of this, and I could hear how tried my sister’s tone was as she had to say it wasn’t my fault. That’s all I remember before I fell asleep.

The next day, we showed up at my grandfather’s (formally Pappy; colloquially The Big Dick) doorstep. I watched from the backseat of Janet’s car as my sister knocked. I watched his face light up in surprise as he looked upon her, then I watched it sink. We had to relive the night in his living room. I covered my face the whole time. He had given me an old sweater to wear. I stretched its sleeve as far as it would go. To sell my innocence, my sister gestured to me. “Look how guilty he feels!” I was shaking. I started to cry.

On the drive to the courthouse, Pappy asked me how I felt. My head was pressed against the glass, and when I went to talk, a sharp pain clouded my words. All I said was, “It hurts to move my jaw.” I watched as he shuttered. No one spoke until we got to the courthouse. 

The next few weeks are just blurs of pain and jargon and big, important wooden rooms. Some lady who worked at the courts accompanied me while I people-watched through the glass banister overlooking the entrance. My dad passed behind us. I turned just in time to see his head craned around his neck, looking right at me. That was the last time I ever saw him.

He had absolutely no case to make. My sister was about to graduate high school, so he didn’t even bother fighting for her, and the only argument he could make as to why I should be in his custody was that, “The bond between a father and his son should not be interfered with.” Indeed.

So now, more than six years removed from my chrysalis, I sit up late at night in a darkened room in Pappy’s house, reconstructing this story for the nth time in my life. Since the night it happened, we had to tell it to Pappy, then I had to tell it to a child psychologist. I’ve told most of my closest friends, and a girlfriend or two. In that time, he’s gotten a DUI, gotten engaged to some ignorant skank who's just finding out what she’s gotten herself into, moved to Florida, and has now acquired a new domestic Battery by Strangulation charge. 

Every time I tell my story though, I smile through it; laughing at the WWE comment and comparing my dad to Donkey Kong as he slings me over his shoulder. I speak all the details of that night from underneath his bulbous nose, and I run my fingers through his thick, dark hair. I shrug off sympathy from listeners, because it’s just my life. 

And I gesture wildly, because that’s how I talk.