Page 8 of Broken Cracks
“Shut the fuck up! She’s not here. Fix your own sandwiches and quit whining like a goddamn bitch,”my father said to her, walloping her so hard that she slammed against the refrigerator. My sister held the side of swollen face and slid down its white laminated door in shock for a moment before she bellowed into more crying. I didn’t know what to do, but my father’s eyes were bloodshot and full of hate, stress, and unhinged rage. My sister kept crying and he slapped her again and she would only stop for a moment from crying and then the cries would get louder. I tried to stop him. To pull his hands back, but my puny eight-year-old hands could do no damage. He slung me out of the way too.“Move back boy and out of my fucking way! Move!”He yanked my sister by the hair along the carpet as her legs and her school dress rose around her head.
“Daddy! Daddy! Stop. Mommy!”she yelled, sobbing without taking a breath as my father sat on top of her with all his weight and rage.
“Shut up! Shut up! I thought I told you to shut the fuck up. Why don’t you listen?”Her voice muffled as he pressed her head into the carpet.
“Dad! Get off her!”My father reached out to put a hand around my neck and flung me again away to the corner. I watched him take her, I watched him grind his teeth together, crack the back of her neck like a crab leg and press her head all the way into the carpet with the cushion from the couch over her head. The cries ceased, but the dead rose.
“Get up, you little dog! Help me bury this fucking body. Won’t talk anymore, will she? Should have listened to me the first time.”My crazed father stood over my sister’s dead body as I stared at him. I buried my sister two days later in the woods, three miles from our house.
Depression became my new friend as I swam in a pool of darkness and self-destruction. I ended up bipolar and feeling as if my brain was split in two. I talked to demons in my head all the time, unable to think clearly. I walked around with a dark cloak of perpetual darkness and fought every man I could. Fist-fighting and the pain of punches became a relief to me.
I killed like my father. I created slingshots and shot them at deer, rats, and smashed as many ants as I could find. Annihilation was the name of the game for me, and boy did I know how to play that tortuous fiddle.
Fire joined the company and burning parts of my school grounds and watching the flames glow into a fury of tangerine-orange and firetruck-reds struck a happy chord of destruction in me. I would stand, pleased with myself, wanting it all to burn to the ground as humans screamed and ran out of the buildings in distress.Yes. Bur,n fuckers. Burn. Feel what I feel.
My father didn’t kill me, but my soul died when the rest of my family did. He sent me to the Serenity nuthouse and every day they kept me under a cloudy Neptunian cocktail of drugs, while I floated away and fantasized about killing him.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.I tapped on the grimy windows in a room so painfully white that it hurt my eyes. I watched birds sit on the windowsill as I tried to summon fury, but the drugs made it impossible, and I sunk into voidless medicated bliss of nothingness. I walked around parading as a zombie for months until I figured out the right things to say to the psych warden.
“How are you feeling today, Damon? Do you have any feelings of rage that you want to discuss?”
I would grin back at the fat lady with large eyes and her magnificent clipboard housed in her hands. I could tell she got off on medicating me, and she was the one who stuck that fucking needle in my arm that put me to sleep.
“No. None at all. I feel very calm and would like to go back and live with my father now. I’m ready.”
Ready to maim. Ready to kill and slit his throat from ear to ear and lick the blood off the knife.But those evil intentions stagnated on the fluffy cloud of pills I had to consume, arousing a lack of anger in me.
“Good, I think you’re making progress, but we need to keep you in here for another six months and slowly wean you off the medication.”
I wanted to punch her yellow-stained teeth in. Six months was a minute too long on my killing clock.Tick. Tock.Every waking hour I consumed the thoughts of killing my father and I chose the day.
A perfectly fine Tuesday. I pretended to take my happy pills, slipping them under my tongue and gulping down dirty tap water while the beady-eyed nurse watched.
As soon as she left, I wiped my mouth and took the ugly little pills out of my mouth, throwing them in the trash by my bed.
I remembered looking at the bird near my window and wishing it dead.“Little Birdy. Little Birdy. Bang. Bang.”If I’d had my slingshot, I would have killed it and snickered when it keeled over like a ten-pin bowling strike.
Days went by and my untampered rage returned.Hello, old friend.I created a plan to leave through the window. The staff were so stupid, so very dumb. I pried away at the window with a butter knife after dinner, able to open it a sliver, waiting for the right moment.
I met a paranoid patient who aided my escape with blankets to shimmy horizontally across the oak tree outside my window.
“I’m escaping, tell no one. Tell no one, otherwise I’ll slit your throat.”My rooming partner with the night terrors and see-through skin agreed.
“I won’t tell. I won’t tell. The window. Go out the window.”I broke out the night after and ran. I ran so hard my lungs hurt, through the thicket of the back woods, not stopping, only pausing to pick up a large log of timber.
Revenge fueled my strides as I burst through the ramshackle house of pain I grew up in, thumping through the living room in the dark.
“Father, oh father. I’m fucking home.”Back then I had hair, rusty-red and bleak, like my tarred-up heart.
“What the fuc-”
His reply didn’t even reach the moldy ceiling as I swung the large piece of lumber like a makeshift ax over his head with all the bloodthirsty rage I could channel through it. His head burst open like a watermelon; blood soaked my tattered shirt. His fat body dropped to the 1960s swirl carpet with a delicious thud, leaving a trail of crimson trickling out the corner of his mouth. His body made a satisfying gurgling sound as my heart raced. I struck him again for cathartic release, vindicating the wrongful death of my sister and the departure of my beloved mother.
No drugs required. I’d been cured. I didn’t want to kill things or fight so much anymore.
Months later, while I rummaged around for street food, cruising the shadowy streets of Serenity, scared of the law and a return to the fluffy ward, an older male with a bike caught my eye.
“Hey boy. Whatcha doing there?”Unwashed and desperate for a meal, I looked up into the eyes of a stocky man built like a Mallee Bull, with a salt and pepper beard. At first sight, I wanted to flee, but I saw the hogs and became curious about the bikes. That day was the same one that would change my life trajectory forever. I squinted up at them.