sewloud

Playing the devil's advocate with inkstainedfingertips  amazing twisty entry last week. Skol, my friend! 




Good morning, Liam.

The voice was warm and filled with yellow light. He was sleepy and curled tight into his own elbows and knees. The bed was nothing like the little bed Grandmother had tucked him into every night, at the foot of her own bed, but if he squeezed his eyes shut very tightly and hummed so that all the noise outside his head muted and remembered the peculiar smell that perfumed the deep lines in the palms of her hands, he was sleeping safe and sound in Grandmother’s room.

Enough of the Land of Nod for you, Liam. Rise and shine with the sun.

He cracked one eye and then the other. An unwashed taste in his mouth, the bleach smell of the sheet and the mothball must of the blanket, the racket coming from the hallway. Someone screaming. Someone crying. Someone shouting. And the underlying whisper of low-pitched voices.

He was still in the hospital.

And where was Granny? He knew where the monsters were, he had dispatched one of them back to where monsters should go. The monster was gone. But Granny was gone, too. Granny who had told him stories about the monsters in their house, who helped him to understand. Softly, he began to cry.

The morning sun was streaking through the sparkling clear glass in the kitchen. He was very fastidious, wiping things clean, rinsing things out, drying things and then folding the dishtowel neatly on the countertop. His morning coffee was finished, the maker put away, a soft-boiled egg eaten and crumbs from his toast wiped up. All cleared away. He was seated once again at the table, the Glock in pieces across the surface, the morning’s newspaper spread out beneath the dissembled handgun. Gun oil and a rag in his hands.

He had decided that today would be the day. It was his 89^th birthday. How he had made it nearly to 90 was an impossible contemplation. He couldn’t conceive of it. Not entirely. Could a person’s internal engine run on the fuel of rage and grief for decades? It could and his had indeed. Sixty years of such incitement.

Six decades of isolation. His wife dead, her mother dead, his son institutionalized. And for the most part, the house as though they had all gone to bed the night before and only he rising in the morning. Alone. The old woman’s bedroom door closed. His wife’s bureau and closet unopened. The child’s room had been torn apart by the police. He had cleared it out later, down to the floorboards, up to the rafters and then closed that door forevermore. Most of it he had burned in the burn barrel out back.

He knew he should have breached the old woman’s room, knew that’s where the answers most probably could be found, but for what end. His wife had hinted enough and yet they had done nothing. His wife obedient, he disbelieving, and the child the victim. He had no doubt about any of that. But proving it would be redundant. Redundant to what he learned that terrible night.

What had his life been? Was this a penance served? For what transgression?

At first, he could not find it in himself to forgive, but as the years departed from his life, and the doctors implored, he began to believe he could. He should. For the sake of the boy.

It was proven useless. A fool's errand. And where after all was said and done and tried did the store of his fatherly love reside?

Again and again, meeting after meeting, even consultations in his own living room, gods how could he sit there and remember walking into the house that evening, his wife shot point blank between the eyes, her body being desecrated by the boy with the kitchen cleaver in his hand. He remembered the drenching shock and then his hands around the child’s throat, he would have choked the very life out of him, but the cunning creature had brought the knife up in both small hands and got him good on the inside of his thigh. Cutting through the thick canvas of the work trousers he had on, and he let go and the boy was gone, through the door into the yard over the fence and down into the wilds of the creek behind the house. He had let out a roar and followed. There was nothing left for him in the house. He knew his wife was dead. She had been beheaded.

Later they told him as if it were a kindness about the Glock and the nine-millimeter sized hole in her forehead. Told him all about it when they returned the gun into his possession.

There was no fixing the child. He had suggested they test him for some sort of poison the old woman might have been feeding him. And not just the poison of her words.

Years passed and the boy grew into an adult and now was descending into a late middle-aged man. Entirely unhinged, they declared, but with different words, clinical, dry, encyclopedic. It was undeniable that the child believed in the monsters he had surely been told about by a vengeful old witch of a woman.

And what of her? Had she always despised her own daughter, loathed her son in law? For what possible reason? Had the boy inherited some kind of mental condition from his grandmother? That seemed reasonable.

But doubt had been cast. In the beginning. Two long years of it. The police and the doctors, the lawyers and the judge, all casting a damning light on him as though by his own hand some trauma had been visited upon his family. After a few years of that, and the child showing no signs of improvement, they finally, blessedly left father and son alone with their own monstrous thoughts.

He had stopped all interaction. The state paid the outrageous bills. The asylum was his home now, the doctors his family. He hadn't visited in, well, decades.

Today, he would visit, the Glock tucked into a pocket. With his own retribution. But first he would visit the cemetery. Leave flowers for his wife, spit on her mother's grave.

He reassembled the pistol and began to load the magazine. His son believed in monsters? Then today he would be a monster.