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davey-in-a-minivan · 6 days ago

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Never did come up with a good title but here is my latest take on #crude monsters, or all the toxic things we've decided we can't live without in the Anthropocene

We would have taken Jane more seriously at happy hour if we’d known about the ghost.

We knew her boyfriend died. At work, we made the right noises; we passed around a sympathy card and bought her meal delivery vouchers. Over drinks, we debated what sort of outrageous gesture she would make. Call in for a month’s worth of sick days. Invite the whole department to a Viking-style funeral. Fling herself out the window of their shared apartment building. Everything was on the table. If you knew Jane, you’d understand.

We didn’t have to wait long. She contacted one of those companies that reduces biomass into fossil fuels and came back with what was left of him in a shimmery vial. We took bets on that too. Stir it into her morning coffee. Sleep with it on a cord around her neck. Mix it into the latest product line so a million customers would spread it over their skin.

The evening after she came to work with a rainbow slick shimmering on her lower lip, Leah slammed her hand on the table. “Ate it,” she said. “Pay up.”

Jane didn’t come to happy hours with us. She rushed home from work to spend all her free time with Fergus—playing at tradwife but afraid to commit, Leah said, while Mary said there was nothing wrong with being a homebody. We offered after the vial, though, so she would know we were thinking about her.

“No thank you,” Jane said, the way we knew she would. Then she added, unexpectedly, “Fergus and I are staying in.”

Mary was the one who’d asked. She stood there, mouth open, and then laughed nervously in response while Jane sailed out the door. As soon as her footsteps faded, we convened.

Had she really said—? Yes. And hadn’t she—no, now that we thought about it, none of us had seen her crying this week. She’d responded to cautious ‘good morning’s with her own and attacked her work the way she used to. She still looked dazed, like the time the delivery boy with that week’s samples walked into the lobby’s glass doors, but she’d been smiling.

“It could be grief. Denial’s one of the stages.”

“A scammer? They knew right away after my car accident. They might check death records too, and AI these days can fake voices so well you’d think your dead grandma was calling you.”

“Someone should be checking on her. Does she have anyone?”

“I drove her home a few times last year when her car was in the shop; I remember the way.”

The four of us spilled out of Mary’s car to gawk at Jane’s apartment building. “Unit 302,” said Leah, who had access to the personnel system, and we trailed after her.

The hallway was warm: an insistent, foreign heat. “Here?” Mary asked, frowning, and the rest of us shrugged.

“They’re finding them in new places now, with all the fracking. Or is that just stirring up the ones that were already there? I don’t remember.”

None of us did.

Ghosts stay near their bodies, but they take their time being born. Hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. You can spot oil fields from the ghostly shimmer of prehistoric ferns, track the lumbering forms of dinosaurs as they step over their bones. Arya swears she saw a megalodon swimming stories up in the air once, but she refuses to tell us where. She says she wants it to still be there for her nieces and nephews someday. There are no human ghosts, not yet. They say if you sit with the bones of our earliest ancestors, sometimes you’ll hear whispers, or the click of stone on stone.

Hauntings aren’t always visible, but the heat is a sign everyone knows. The old oxygen-rich atmosphere of a million years BC, maybe, or the pressure of so much time alchemizing them body and soul into something new.

The point being, the heat from a haunting shouldn’t be radiating out of the walls three floors up in an apartment building. Someone would’ve noticed before.

Leah rapped on the door, and we milled around until Mary ended up in front. She’s not old enough to be grandmotherly—you don’t see much of that in our office—but she was the closest we had.

Jane opened the door a minute later. She paused at the sight of us and then, unusual for someone finding four colleagues on their doorstep, smiled. She’d been smiling like that on her lunch break, we remembered. Smiling like it hurt.

“We’re here to see how you’re holding up,” Mary said.

Jane looked flushed, like she’d been bent over an oven. “Oh, you didn’t need to do that. I’m fine.”

“And how’s Fergus?” Arya asked. Leah shot her a look.

“He’s doing great.” Did we sell lip gloss with that rainbow shimmer? “I just don’t know what I’d do without him. Did you want to say hi?”

Later Arya told us, “I signed the card. If my $5 Grubhub donation was under false pretenses, I wanted to know about it.” So she walked in. A moment later, we heard her scream.

If it had only been one of us, we wouldn’t have come in after her. But numbers give you confidence. That’s why we stuck together, even though Leah was bossy and Mary was old-fashioned and Arya had the social grace of the pigeon that got stuck in our revolving door last month. So we jostled through the doorway, and this is what we saw.

Besides the Grubhub gift card and a scented candle, the office had pulled together to buy a bouquet. The vase stood next to the candle on the coffee table, the flowers inside still bright even though they’d come discounted from the grocery store florist.

Behind the coffee table was a sofa. On the sofa sat a man.

We’d seen Fergus before: in the parking lot picking Jane up after work, at a few holiday dinners, in the pictures she showed us of date nights and anniversaries. His ghost looked like him, barely. A washed-out tracery layered over itself again and again, edges hazy, rippling the air around him like a mirage. His hair clung wet and glistening to the contours of his face. Eyes sunken into black wells bored straight ahead into the wall.

Arya didn’t like being embarrassed. She had a reputation to maintain; she was the one who’d dealt with the pigeon and always checked the mouse trap behind the microwave. She spun toward Jane. “What the fuck? What did you do?”

Jane settled down next to the ghost. He didn’t twitch. “He came back for me. I was going to bring it up, but you were all so sympathetic, I didn’t know how to explain. I’m glad you came by.”

Arya spluttered. Mary reached out, like she wanted to put a soothing hand on Jane’s shoulder, but she couldn’t bring herself to get too close. “Jane,” she said. “He’s dead.”

“I know,” Jane said. “I don’t mind.”

“Right,” Leah said, with the same gleeful horror that filled her voice when she showed us the latest awful Teams message she’d gotten from the creep in IT. “We should go. Tell Fergus we’re glad he’s feeling better.”

If Leah was done, the rest of us were too. None of us wanted to get caught alone in that boiling apartment. On our way out, Arya gestured at the vase, finding her voice for a parting shot. “Change the water,” she said. “I can smell something rotting in there.”

When we got back to the car, we sat motionless for a while. Mary didn’t even nag us to put on our seat belts.

“He looks good for someone who got hit by a semi.”

“Ghosts should be more… together, shouldn’t they? I’ve never heard of one looking like that.”

“He’s a rush job. He shouldn’t exist.”

“The grease on her mouth…”

“Do you think they, well,” one of us started. Then we dissolved into giggles until Arya, who thinks she’s better than the rest of us because that kind of thing is beneath her, said, “It’s not any more disgusting than the regular kind” but Leah pointed out, “Think about the stains” and Arya, who isn’t above having to do laundry, agreed.

“Didn’t look like anyone was home, anyway. Ghosts can’t think. They just repeat themselves.”

“Maybe human ghosts can.”

“Not that one. You saw him.”

“As long as it keeps Jane happy, who cares? They don’t hurt people either.”

“It can’t be healthy.”

“That relationship’s never been healthy. I should’ve gotten a picture; no one’s going to believe me.”

“That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”

“Sorry, are you not planning on telling everybody you know about this?”

Maybe we did go home and tell our family, our friends, our social media networks. But none of us reported Jane. Who would we call? The police? An exorcist? A hazardous materials remediation company?

It was out of our hands. We wanted to see what would happen next.

Leah came by our desks as we were settling in the next morning. “She brought him to work.”

She didn’t have to say who. We checked over our shoulders, but she shook her head. “Down in the parking lot. Come on.”

The four of us circled Jane’s car. Fergus sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead with those oil well eyes. Grease beaded off his skin and dripped into the front cupholder. Jane, usually so neat, had left a pile of fast food wrappers in the backseat. Empty wrappers, one half-eaten burger, another still wrapped tightly in paper. Was she trying to feed him? Did he eat?

“Should we call someone?” Mary asked.

“And say what? It’s not like she left a dog in there. He’s made of petroleum; this is his natural habitat.”

“His natural habitat is six feet under.” Arya hadn’t forgiven him for making her scream.

“I don’t envy the poor asshole who comes out to vape and sees this looking at them. She could have at least put up a sun visor.”

The three of us exchanged glances, but Leah marched back into the building, and we followed. If anyone discovered Fergus on their smoke break, we didn’t see it happen, even though we found reasons to drift by the windows on the way to the printer or the bathroom. We were watching when Jane clocked out for the day. She opened the car door, climbed inside, and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.

We were too high up to see, but we knew he didn’t do anything back.

Fergus sat in the parking lot all through the next day, too. The car’s back seat swam with wrappers now. Someone in another office must have called security to complain, though, because Jane got a long phone call and the next day her car was empty. No ghost, no garbage, and a long, dark streak on the passenger seat.

Jane seemed to take it alright. She kept speeding through work to rush home, typing so fast she started wearing compression gloves that sheathed her hands in gray up to the fingertip. She must have sweated under the stretchy fabric and the long sleeves she wore even though the AC was broken near her cubicle and the whole area sweltered. Another reason she raced home, maybe, along with the way her cubicle wouldn’t stay clean. She’d always tacked the walls with photos, but papers covered her desk, her trash can overflowing. We thought the janitor might be skipping her until we overheard him grumbling as he hauled another load away, the plastic bag bulging with irregular shapes. Leah peeked into the bin once on her way over to our desks. “Who needs ten men’s travel size deodorants?” she asked. “Is she turning into a hoarder now too?”

“Maybe she’s getting rid of Fergus’s things, and her apartment has a trash bag limit,” Mary suggested.

“I doubt he uses deodorant anymore,” Arya muttered.

Two of us were trying to get a better look at the papers burying her desk—they looked like the same document replicated over and over, but no workflows required that many copies—when Mary gasped. Jane had bent down to refill a printer tray, and her shirt hiked up to expose the bare skin of her side. A dark red handprint marked her waist.

“Are you alright?” Mary asked.

Jane blinked at her, confused. “Of course I am. Paper’s not that heavy.”

“Your side,” Mary said, and Jane laughed.

“It’s nothing. Don’t worry about me.”

We huddled together the next time Jane went to the restroom. “So much for saying ghosts don’t hurt people.”

“He didn’t grab her,” Arya said quietly.

“What do you mean? What else could have done that?”

“No, it was his hand. But the way the fingers splayed… I don’t think he grabbed her. It looked more like if you took someone’s hand and…” She demonstrated, taking her own wrist in her other hand and bringing her palm to her chest. “Pressed it.”

We thought then of the gloves covering everything but the tips of Jane’s fingers.

Even Leah didn’t have anything to say to that for a moment. Then she shook her head. “I always knew she was a freak about him.”

Mary twisted her own hands together. “Shouldn’t we—?”

“What? Some people are beyond help.” She turned away from our whispered conference. “I’m sick of talking about this. I heard there’s leftover birthday cake in the break room.”

Mary frowned. Arya chewed her lip. But Jane wasn’t our friend. None of this was hurting us. So we followed Leah. Like always.

I drove back to Jane’s apartment on my own. The spot I parked in was marked for fifteen-minute drop offs. I spent ten of them sitting behind the wheel, trying to work up the courage to go up alone.

When I did, I didn’t need to remember Jane’s room number. Heat curled out from underneath her door. Sweat broke out on my forehead.

I hoped Jane wouldn’t answer when I knocked, but of course she did. Where else would she be?

“Hello,” I said, and stepped inside before she could change her mind. The apartment had gone downhill since my last visit. The carpet squelched under my feet, oil oozing up from its fibers. In the vase, bright flowers jostled for space with faded blossoms and mold-fuzzed stems. Men’s slacks and button-downs poured out of the bedroom door in drifts. The room was buried in the material of their life together, echoed on top of itself into incoherence. Hauntings shouldn’t do that, but then, Fergus wasn’t a normal haunting. Jane dug him up too soon.

“It’s just you?” Jane asked.

“Just me.” I wondered if she even remembered my name. I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t. “I’m worried. I don’t think this is healthy.”

She stepped to one side, shielding the ghost who sat in the same place on the sofa, staring at nothing. “I need him.”

I understood. At work they were Jane-and-Fergus, the way we were Leah-and-Mary-and-Arya-and-me. You get used to the patterns that make up your life, even when they leave you waist-deep in garbage.

“He shouldn’t be like this.” Surely Jane had to realize that, when she picked up his burning hands and pressed them to her skin because he wouldn’t lift a finger for her on his own. “He shouldn’t be here. I don’t think he’d want to be hurting you.” I didn’t know that for sure. Maybe he’d always been like this, a blank-eyed doll who left nothing good in his wake, but she’d cried so hard when he died.

Jane sat down behind the trash-strewn coffee table, hunching protectively toward him. I imagined I could hear her flesh sizzling, but she didn’t flinch. I couldn’t smell anything over rotten flowers and the sickly sweet of the candle we’d bought her, half-melted in the heat without even needing the matches scattered next to it. “I love him. Shouldn’t I have that?”

Why not? Why shouldn’t she drown in oil and memories with burn scars crawling up her arms, if that’s what she wanted? She was doing it to herself.

We all did it to ourselves.

I rested one hand on the doorknob. The metal felt cool against my skin. “Do you want to get drinks? Just the two of us. We could talk about it.”

Jane shook her head. She’d clenched reddened fingers around Fergus’ unresponsive wrist. With her free hand, she dug through the garbage on the table. “I can’t leave him.”

“Not even for a little while?” I didn’t know why I was still trying. I felt sorry for her. I felt sorry for me. I wanted to believe that someone, somewhere, could let go of what was bad for them. “Can’t you try?”

Jane looked at me. Her eyes weren’t glassy or tear-filled or any of the other descriptors Leah would have used to write her off. She looked like she felt a little sorry for me, too. “I don’t want to.”

She released her grip on Fergus’ wrist and brought her scalded hand up to fumble with something small and square she’d pulled from the mess. I tried to make it out as she leaned forward and took a long breath from the vase. The air in the room hung heavy with rot and sweetness and fuel. “Thank you for the flowers,” she said, and lit a match.

#OOOUHH #deeply unsettling. love it

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davey-in-a-minivan · 7 days ago

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Reach Heaven (Through Violence)

When I was in 2nd grade, my school started a zero-tolerance policy for bullying. I want to emphasize that I started out very excited for this program. I was a small, visibly autistic child on a playground with fourth graders on it. In theory, this program might as well have been called The Rescue Babs Initiative.

In practice, however, zero-tolerance programs almost always sink into madness. The motivations never line up right - too many incentives for cheating.

The first victim of the program was actually my friend, Sam. I was standing next to him in line when one of the fourth graders gut punched him. There was no reason for the punch, he was just small and in arm's reach. Sam got the wind knocked out of him, but he managed to gasp out the phrase stupid motherfucker right as the playground aide ran over to keep the peace.

(Sam had an incredible vocabulary for a 2nd grader. Consequence of his dad being a recently divorced mechanic.)

Puncher got a two week suspension. That was fine. But Sam got a one week one for verbal abuse, which was beyond the pale. But that’s just what zero-tolerance is, right? No hitting became a rule everyone had to follow, and it didn't stop when someone hit us. So our options as kids were to somehow make like Jesus and ascend up to heaven… or solve things ourselves.

We started solving things ourselves.

I'll be honest, I think that was always the plan. A school can do a lot of things to reduce bullying, but if the goal is zero, there's only one path forward: Shoot the messenger.

---

My part in the story was a few weeks after that. Long enough to know that the school's new unofficial policy was to suspend kids that reported problems, short enough to have no idea how to defend myself. It turned out the 4th grader that hit Sam was part of a trio, and that trio had their sights on me next.

I asked some of my classmates what to do, and they said that the best idea was to just ignore the bullies. Refuse to give them a reaction. That was dogshit advice, but it was common enough in the early 2000s and it's not like I can fault 2nd graders for not knowing much about life.

Anyway. I took the advice and I ignored my bullies. I ignored them when they said nasty things about my mom, and I ignored them when they bounced soccer balls off my head, and the one time I broke was when the biggest of the trio grabbed my arm hard enough to leave finger shaped bruises. We were watching a movie in the gym when he did that, and I leaned over and told him he could hold my hand if he was scared of the dark. Which worked, thank God. The grip hurt bad enough I had to excuse myself for a bit to keep my composure.

I think a more mentally flexible kid would've changed strategies by then. Clearly, things were escalating. But it's hard for me to change my mind, so I stuck to my bad strategy, right up until the day the big kids caught me after school. I was crossing the baseball field when they got me. It was just one of those places you had to walk through to make it to the bike rack.

The big guy, again, was the instigator. He pushed me down then stood over me, yelling for me to get back up. But I knew that if I got back up, he'd just push me down again, and for whatever reason, their Bully Code didn't allow for kicking a kid that was already down. So I stuck to the grass, and they tried a bunch of things to goad me into standing back up. Eventually, I started kicking at them while on my back, and one of them took the opportunity to grab my leg. Second bully thought that looked fun, so he grabbed my other leg. Kicking me like that was off limits, but dragging wasn't, so they just started pulling me around that way.

They were so much taller than me that I was almost vertical during the pull so all my weight was put on my shoulders. And the fields were just made of unkind stuff. There was crushed gravel all over the place, spilled out from the divider between the big kid playground and the little kid playground, so every time they dragged me over a piece it just ripped a new gouge up my back. The ground itself was sunbaked caliche and dead crabgrass. There was a grit to it, like sand stuck to the outside of a clay pot.

It grated all the skin off my upper back. Everything between the bottom of my neck to the bottom of my shoulder blades. I don't know at what points I went from yelling, to screaming, to just crying, but I did, and I know they seemed almost giddy every time it changed. Eventually they finished off with one loop around the baseball diamond and that hurt the worst. The dust there stuck to the snot and spit all over my face and made it into a foul mud, and the same happened in my shirt. The dust stung like salt, and the gravel in the lines tore open a few more cuts for dirt to pour in. I remember them stopping, and actually crying again I was so relieved. It was done. Thank God, it was finally done. They were done hurting me.

They left me on my back near homebase (a base). They'd finally got the reaction they were looking for.

It took me a few minutes after that to stagger back to my feet. I was able to wash the snot-mud off my face in the bathroom, but I couldn't bring myself to touch my back. It just felt like it was on fire. Then I made it back to the bike rack.

That’s where my older sister, Liz, waiting for me. She was just a grade ahead of me but it always felt bigger than that. There’s some deep weight associated with being the oldest. She could see that I was dirty and tear soaked so she asked what happened. I didn’t know how to put it in words, so I just tried lifting my shirt to show her. It made a sticky, tacky sound coming up - like the plastic coat coming off a slice of American cheese. Tchhhhk.

I didn’t know how bad they’d got me before I heard that noise.

She looked at my back for maybe two seconds before telling me to put my shirt back down. I never actually looked at it when it was fresh, but I still had straggling scars by the time I got to highschool. Long silver-grey lines, visible mostly for the dirt still stuck in them. She looked a little sick when I turned around, but she kept it cool, which I really appreciated. I always hated crying in public, and I was half a hair from crying all over again. I don't think I'd have been able to keep it together if she'd freaked out too.

Instead, she just asked me some questions. Who did this, how long they’d been doing it, what I’d been doing, if I’d told anyone. Some 4th graders, a month, trying to ignore them, nobody.

She mulled those answers over. I could see her trying to chart a course forward - trying to figure out what it would take to solve this problem for good. She's always had this weird, sad, blank face that she'd make when she found a solution she didn't like. She'd make that face, then think some more, then make the face. Then think.

Eventually, she just made the face.

Don't tell the parents, she said. I can fix this. But only if you don’t tell them.

I believed her. She was the most capable person I knew, and her word was gold. So I didn't tell our parents. I biked home, and every drop of sweat that rolled down my back felt like acid on my skin. I remember getting home and beelining straight to the bath, because I needed something to put the fire out. Took that as my moment to cry it out again too. First time I'd cried was from pain, but the second time was from the cruelty. Second time took longer, but the nice thing about a cold bath is that the water never runs out. I could just pop the plug out with my toes and just keep rinsing and draining and rinsing and draining until my mind was as clean and empty and stark as the tub itself. Then I could go fill that emptiness up with Calvin and Hobbes.

It worked.

Mostly.

---

I spent the whole next week feeling nervous anytime I was outside and Liz wasn't nearby. Some days she'd beat me to the bike racks, and I'd be relieved as hell to just go home. Other days, I'd be the first one out, and then I'd have to spend a few minutes worrying about what I'd do if the big kids showed up. But they never did. Liz always got there just a few minutes later, and I'd pretend I hadn't been planning escape routes.

Friday, I was sweating by myself when she showed up a few minutes later than normal. She unlocked her bike but she didn't move to leave. She had this big, long cable-type lock, maybe six feet of braided steel. She folded it over in her hands so it looked like a swatter and swung it a few times in the air. Made it whistle like a falling anvil in a cartoon.

Today's baseball practice, she said. All Our Guys are on the baseball team.

Our Guys. Odd phrasing. Also, I actually hadn't known that about them, but I nodded along anyway. She wasn't really looking at me as she talked - she was inspecting the lock.

My plan, she continued, is to wait here until baseball's done. Me and you. When it gets time I'll send you outside the bike cage.

The cage was a chain link fence, maybe six feet tall, built all around the rack. They’d lock it after school as an extra precaution against bike thieves.

Your job, she continued, will be to hold the gate closed after they're all in. Keep em’ stuck. Think you can do that?

She was being very frank, which helped me think clearly. I didn't think I could actually hold the gate closed if all of them ran into it at once, but I knew where a big half broken cinder block was, and I knew if I could wedge it in there, it would hold. So I told her that.

Great, she said. Do that.

Then I went to go get the block. She gave the cable a few more experimental swings, right as I made it around the corner.

I'd been thinking in straight lines before that. Just meeting goals. It wasn't until that moment that I really allowed myself to know what was happening. That I allowed myself to have a choice.

I chose to jog a little faster. I wanted revenge.

---

I came back with the block a few minutes later, then we just talked like nothing was happening. The sun was shining, and we’d both gotten into bionicles, and it was easy to talk and be people. Normal, happy people.

But that feeling went away when I heard the coach tweet a long whistle. Me and Liz both knew that was the signal that practice was done. I walked out and got my bric while she folded the cable in half in her hand again. Then we both waited.

Eventually I saw the kids that drug me around the baseball diamond emerge from behind the portables. I watched them make a straight line back to the bike rack. They were laughing together, having a good time. Being normal. Like me and my sister. I realized I could let things be normal too. I saw my chance to let things go softball pitched to me, nice and easy, and I didn't even bother to swing. I didn't want normal anymore. I wanted this. I knew why my sister had that lock, and I'd thought about it, and I liked it.

God help me, I think I needed it.

The kids went inside the bike cage. I gave them ten paces head start, then put the cinder block under the gate. That was the signal Liz had been waiting for.

She blitzed those boys. There were three of them, and the smallest still had two inches on her, so they probably would have kicked her ass if they ever had a moment to think. But she never gave them that moment. She picked the biggest kid, and decided he needed the first blow. I remember how much muscle she put into that swing - the cable was so heavy, and she was so small, that it kind of swung her back as she made that first half spin. Like a dog getting wagged by its own tail.

It was a perfect connection. Flawless. She swung through her target, not at it, and the resulting slap that the cable made bouncing off the biggest kid's stomach was loud enough to echo through the cage. It brought a tear to my eye. It brought a tear to his eye too.

The trio split after that, bouncing around the cage like fresh broke billiards. I can't describe how Liz did it, exactly, but she managed to chase the boys back together so she could hit them all more efficiently. She had a real knack for getting them right between the shoulders, so I never got to see the real perfection of her work, but she wasn't above swinging for the arms or legs if that was all she had. Those marks I could see, and they were brutal. The welts were wider and thicker than my thumb, like giant purple worms were trying to burrow out of their skin. Some even bled. I cheered on every hit.

Liz, for her part, just had a sort of grim, single minded determination to her. She was so angry she was shaking, and so scared that tears just kept running down her face, and she was grinning all the way back to her molars, but the grin didn't get any bigger after a solid hit than a glancing one. When the kids started blubbering, she didn't change her process. I'd spent my time crying, she'd spent her time crying, of course they were getting theirs in too: That's what violence does. It brings tears. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Eventually, one of the kids split off from the main herd and scrambled up the fence, gecko-style. Liz let him go. It was either that, or take her attention off the other two. Easy choice.

Now, there were two kids left, the big one, and one of his smaller friends. Smaller friend did the same trick. I was worried he was gonna turn back, fight me and open the gate for his buddy, but he just fled for the hills. I remember thinking, damn, I hope they never forgive each other for this. I hope this ruins their whole friendship. I hope this festers into something awful.

The one kid that was left really was trapped though. He wasn't built for climbing and he had no one to work as a distraction for him. Every time he started trying to make it up the fence, my sister would just twist up like a spring, then swing the cable with both hands right into his spine. The slap it made every time she did that was loud enough to hurt my ears. He never made it more than two hits like that before hopping off the fence and just trying to run around some more. He could get Liz tangled up in the bikes for a bit if he really tried, but it never bought him enough time to actually get out. She'd always find her way out of the thicket, swing the cable, and send him running again.

Eventually, he just couldn't run anymore. He sat down, and my sister hit him a few times, telling him to stand up. He refused. He knew he was gonna get hit either way, so he might as well get hit sitting down. He put his arms up after a bit and let those take a beating too. Eventually he just started begging her to stop. So she did.

He cried he was so relieved. I remembered how that felt: It’s done. Thank God, it’s finally done. They’re done hurting me.

Liz told me to come in and show him my back. I took my shirt off, and I showed him a scab as large as a dinner plate. Cracked up like dry river mud.

He looked sick. Started babbling about how he didn't know. Said he thought I was crying because I was just a kid - that he didn't know he was actually hurting me. That he'd just wanted to get a rise out of me and didn't know it would take so much.

He didn't know he'd gone too far until it was too late.

And suddenly, it was like looking in a mirror.

Two snotty, welted boys, crying alone in the dirt. Backs burning like fire. Ashamed. Trapped. Realizing that they'd just done something awful, and worse, that they’d dragged the people that meant the most to them along for the ride.

I hated him more at that moment than when he drug me over gravel. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill anything but their own brokenness reflected. Looking at him was unbearable. Like staring straight into the sun.

I could've hit him again if I hadn't just gorged myself on violence. But I had. I was fat with it, sick and aching - anything more and I would have puked. So I just told him to get his bike and go. Please. Just go.

He did. He staggered to his feet, and he grabbed his bike before running away like all the demons in hell were following behind. All bar two. There was a swingset nearby, and once he was fully out of sight, Liz and I walked over to it. We picked two seats next to each other and sat for a while, talking until our hands stopped shaking. Can’t remember about what. We didn’t really know how to process what had just happened. Still don’t, to be honest.

Then we went home.

---

Thanks to @elisabethdeep-blog, @foldingfittedsheets, @amateurmasksmith, @caramel-catss @arataya, and @rozenkingdom for being my alpha readers.

And thanks @lizardho, for being my first friend, my best friend, and my childhood bodyguard. I know it took a toll on you. I'm truly sorry.

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