greetings; our characters’ first ever meeting
A laundry list of things he doesn’t understand and it gets longer by the hour, by the minute, and by the second. He wears it like a second layer of skin, shedding like a chameleon when he finds his answers and thickening when he finds his questions.
Last night’s dinner saw tissue removed from his arm. It fell as heavily as the word ‘divorce’ did from the neighbor’s mouth that morning, dripping like fresh sludge from a wasteland too close to home.
"Sometimes people aren’t happy together." His parents try to explain change.
He’s only eight years old. Tommy’s arrival is a mere countdown younger than himself. There are so many questions he doesn’t know how to ask. Two years later he’ll finally find the right words.
"What about us? Are we happy?"
Instead, he packs layers of tissue back onto his arms, his back, his shins, the crook of his neck, and to the left of his chest at the fifth intercostal space where his heart beats the strongest. Behind an impenetrable wall, he loses his pulse. Three years later he’ll finally understand.
For now, he waits until the neighbors move out and the new boy eventually moves into the bedroom next to his very own. Oliver’s skin has never felt so thick; summer is suffocating. Canada is ‘up’, and this olive-skinned boy with bruised knees and swollen eyes traveled ‘down’.
Oliver meets him on the front lawn and stares him down in the living room — this boy named Tommy, who sits there, mouse-like with his shoulders curled in on themselves. For the next few years, his eyes remain downcast, lips pressed together to protect the world’s most gentle secret. The sound of his voice remains an enigma as does the redness coloring lead eyes that get heavier with each passing day. He emits an air of defeat. The couch he sits on looms over him, senses weakness and swallows him whole.
Something bitter rises in the back of Oliver’s throat. It tastes vile and rotten, and his gut churns. The heat’s getting to him. None of it makes any sense. He doesn’t understand how this boy, who looks like he’s drowning, is supposed to save them.
Divorce is the separation of family when a mother and father don’t love each other. What, then, is this?
"You’re not family.” Hatred begins at the tip of his tongue and will slowly eat him alive.
