Page 3 of Thy Kingdom Come
He draws one on his too.
The man who slit Cara’s throat focuses his attention on the wardrobe. Punky holds his breath. With no hurry, he walks over and inhales deeply, placing his hands on the door.
Punky reaches for the toy knife, armed and ready. Slathered in war paint, his face is a reflection of the injuries inflicted on his ma, and he’s ready to go to war.
The man, however, doesn’t want to hurt Punky. He simply unlocks the door.
“We’re away to the car,” he orders the other two men pilfering like common thieves.
They take one last look at the mess they made, snickering about the Kelly geebag. They’re out the door, but the man, the tall man turns over his shoulder, once again looking at the wardrobe door. He places his bloody pointer over his smirking lips, gesturing Punky isn’t to make a sound.
He’s gone a moment later.
Punky waits for silence, and although he promised his ma he’d stay hidden, he slowly opens the door. The song on the radio switches from Elvis to a song Punky’s mum sings to him to keep the nightmares away. But when he crawls toward his ma, he realizes his nightmares have just begun.
The song is “Stand by Me” by Ben E. King, and Punky begins to hum the chorus as he gets closer to his ma. There is so much blood, but Cara said it’s not real. She’s going to wake at any moment. She has to.
“Ma,” Punky says, reaching out with black and white painted hands, nudging her shoulder softly. “Wake up. I did whatcha asked. It’s time to wake up now.”
But Cara doesn’t wake. She never will.
“Mummy!” Punky’s pleas are a little louder, more desperate because he doesn’t like this game. “Please wake up. I wanna go home.”
Punky looks down at his hands, covered in his ma’s blood. He turns them over and over, not understanding what he’s seeing.
“Are ye sleepin’? Ye knackered, Ma? It’s Baltic in here. I’ll keep ya warm.”
Punky pulls the blanket off the bed and curls up beside his dead ma, tucking it around them. He’s suddenly so tired. He wraps her arm around him, snuggling close to the only person in the world who showed him any love.
Before he succumbs to sleep, Punky reaches out and dips three fingers into a coagulated pool of blood just inches away. He then runs those fingers down the middle of his forehead, leaving three bloodied slashes in their wake. His face is a grotesque picture of everything he saw—a black, white, and red imagery, reflecting the death of his childhood.
Three men changed his life forever, and as long as it takes, no matter what Punky has to do, he’s going to find those men and paint their faces too…before he rips them from their mutilated corpses.
A kaleidoscope of black and white lays before Punky, but he’ll soon realize…nothing in life ever is.