roman.
he hits you and he hits you and he hits you until there’s nothing left but his hands and the light coming in through the window. he sends you away and all you want to do is go home. he sends you away and you curl under the thin blankets late at night, your heart racing through your body. there are more monsters here than there were at home. shiv isn’t here. there’s no one here to lean on. there isn’t anyone at home to lean on either, but here the nothingness is its own person, the scenery itself is cruelty. you want to go home. you want to go home so badly. you beg him to bring you home. he laughs at you. all he does is laugh at you. but when he’s laughing he doesn’t hit you. when they’re laughing they’re not hitting you, except when they are. except when you die. you want to go home. he tells you there is nothing left for you at home. he tells you a strange story, about a boy who came home and brought with him pestilence and plague, a boy who killed everyone because he couldn’t do as he was told. you don’t know what this means.
when it’s summer, you’re allowed to be home. kendall isn’t allowed to lock you up anymore. you sit with shiv in the sunshine. your father doesn’t let you leave the property, the grounds when you’re home, but you have nowhere you want to go. he says there’s no telling what you might have brought home. you’re not allowed in shiv’s room when you’re home. but you can sit with her on the porch. shiv is older than you remember. she has long hair now, snaps at you like your mother used to. but she still sits with you on the porch. you can still make her laugh. if you’re laughing with shiv, your dad isn’t hitting you. if you’re laughing with shiv, the world seems to fall away. you pretend you never have to go back.
of course you have to go back. you go back and you come home and you go back and you come home and after a while, you can’t ever speak of the things that happen to you there. voices in the darkness, the kind of terror you can’t go back to. after a while you start laughing. there’s nothing else to be done, after all. and if you’re laughing, they can’t hit you. this is the rule. you learn quickly that no one follows rules. you learn quickly the only way to survive is to be the one to make the rules.
he hits you and he hits you and then one day, out of the blue, you’re bigger than him. you’re stronger than him. he’s fading. you wait for him to raise his hand again. you think this time you’ll hit back. he doesn’t hit you again, not for years, not until you think the danger is long past, and then his hand comes flying back into your face like the past twenty two years meant nothing, your tooth buried in his palm, and you bend over as ken tries to act like he always took care of you. fine, im fine, im fine, im fine. you don’t go to the roast. you don’t go anywhere. you sit on the balcony and you think about how you’re bigger than him now. you could hit him back.
and then he dies.
and then you die.
but you’re still alive. your body won’t stop functioning. the breath doesn’t stop coming. the memories don’t abate. you remember more things than you ever have. you do strange things, you tell no one. you call up kerry every night. you ask her to tell you about him. im just getting the ideas for the eulogy, you know? how would you describe him to someone who’s never met him? one night, you call your mother. he didn’t know how to love anything, she says. i should never have let him send you away. you wonders if she knows that you never really came back. you do strange things. you tell no one.
election night. you feel the world slipping out from beneath your father’s fingers and you do whatever you can to claw it back for him. he’s dead. you pretend this will bring him back.
and then its the funeral, and all the years bleed through. he hit you and he hit you and he hit you until there was nothing left but his hands and now he’s gone. now he’s gone. you want to drag his body across the floor. you want to curl up in his arms like you never did as a kid. he sent you away and he stopped hitting you when you got big enough to fight back and now he’s gone. coward. your father. the only person you’ve ever loved. the only person you’ve ever wanted to love you back. your father. he’s gone. he’s gone. there’s nothing left for you. there’s nothing left here. and now they all know; the world knows; all the worst nightmares you had as a kid come to fruition. they all know exactly who you are, how weak you are, how lonely. they all saw you cry. your father would be so disappointed. you can see him rising from the grave. you can see the disdainful smirk. of course, kendall could do what you couldn’t. it’s why he sent you away.
your father was the boy in the story who brought pestilence and plague unto his family and it’s why he let you go to a school where they took everything from you. your father killed everything he touched. your father grew up thinking he killed everything he touched and the only way for him to live with it was to make it true. but he never finished the job; he killed everything he touched but he let you live, forced air through your lungs. he didn’t take you with him. he never did.
he’s gone. there’s nothing left. you plunge into the streets and hope you never come back out.
