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“William! Open the door!”
“Shut the fuck up, Grandma!”
“William, I just wanna-” she tried the handle again, “I just wanna talk!”
“What, wanna fuckin’ beat me?”
“What?! William-”
Moments like this made her think angels, and shit, maybe everything holy, was a sales pitch from Collections Etc. You fall in love with your daughter’s baby and he twists and he twists what you do until it hurts him, just to provoke your guilt.
And you love that sensitive little bastard all the same, you do, you really, really do. You stay up when he doesn’t come home. You buy him clothes and mend what needs mending after you wash, dry, and iron them. You made him a small savings with an account you plan to give him when he graduates high school.
Hell is when he accuses you of beating him and instead of defending your love you think back and try to find everything you did to make him believe that.
“William, sweetie, really, I just want to talk to you. You haven’t come to get your dinner from the fridge like you said you would in two days! I don’t think you’ve left the room at all, Willy!”
“Stop fucking watching me, fuck! That’s fucking weird, Grandma! Are you a fucking stalker or do you wanna see your grandson’s cock, huh?”
“William!”
“That how you get your sick kicks, bitch?”
“You motherfucker!”
He pushed and pushed and pushed her to the edge. This had to be the part he loved to keep begging for it like this, and she felt bad. Raising a child this angry at the tender age of fifty seven took what little drive she had left. And then Thunderbolt gave himself a stroke on the toilet, and it felt like par for the terrible course. Everything else had gone and so would her “bad boy” who kept her sane even when he was the one driving her crazy. When he “died” (whatever this is isn’t living), William found more of her to take and tore it right out.
He needed direction, but she wasn’t strong enough to give it anymore.
But, really, William was a wonderful thing to believe in. He was tender and sensitive and clever and opportunistic. She tried her best to feed the hobbies he chose and get him in Boy Scouts and youth groups to give him a shot at finding some life passions to chase… or a job. Anything. They stopped hearing from the school principal finally, and that’s the first sign of hope she’d found in about a year that she wasn’t the only one trying to get William somewhere.
He loved to debase her, and the shame lit her ears up as soon as she cursed at him. It fed all the parts of him who felt the kind of hurt he accused her of: of being beaten, being watched, being violated… No happy person talked like that and she knew it.
Her back begged for her to sit down and her knees seconded the motion. An apology would get thrown back in her face, she knew it, and she couldn’t take another sleepless night. She sighed.
“William… I’ll be back with your dinner, if you want it up here.”
He heard the floor creak down the hallway and stopped holding his breath. The room spun with the cashier price roll of “truths” that stained everything he thought about. Self-esteem was just lying, it was lies. He had nothing worth congratulating. When you’re shit, you oughta feel like it. It’s honest. Why ruin a clean ashtray when you’re unclean to start with? The sleeve of his shirt kept brushing up against yesterday’s little “incident” and it was comforting.
It was something that made sense to cry about, even if it made you a pussy. What the fuck was so wrong about today other than the victimless miasmic anger that permeated everything, like nausea. God. Nausea ends when you puke, right?
If he killed himself, it would be the best thing he could do for the world. Take yourself out of the picture, get out of the way, stop breathing all the air, what little was left.
Piles of towels and sheets and clothes and garbage covered up the floor vents, insulating the room into a suffocating snowglobe of dust.
God. Fuck that guy. Praying was the same as eating lunch with the fucking principal: it pretends you have someone to talk to when no one can actually stand you. He looked across the room into the mirror perched on his dresser and decided he didn’t even deserve to pretend. He’d cut up that half-filled baby album over the summer. “This little light of mine”... Fuck, you want a light?
He pressed his right thumb over the end of the black Scripto lighter the second he let go of the flame. The sparkwheel and the shroud were indistinguishable. The blood in his thumbprint could have been boiling. The throb was instant.
“William?”
Grandma was back, and he was so humiliated that he wanted to cry. It didn’t make sense, she didn’t see, she didn’t know, and none of it made a difference.
“What?!”
She sat down the aluminum TV tray by the door, with the warmed plate, a cosmic brownie, a stadium cup full of Ovaltine, and the copy of The Red Badge of Courage that he’d left in the living room by accident.
“Dinner,” she heaved, as the sciatica made all the energy rush out of her like the flushing of a toilet. “I’m going to lay down. Shout if you need something.”