I’m really frightened
that things will never be all right. Everything will get worse. I’m
not going to have any supper again tonight and I may freeze to death before morning. Unless
I’m willing to take another kid’s food away or beat his head in with the
baseball bat I found this morning. Then
I could steal a coat.
My father is
distant. I think he knows something about my mother and the rest, but
he’s not going to tell me. When he does speak he calls me Alfred instead
of Lucky, my nickname since I can remember.
He said my little brothers are out looking for food, but I doubt
it. They’re too young to be out and about in the dark on this dangerous night.
When he lied to me, he stared into the fire and didn’t turn to look at
me. I know that means something is very wrong.
We hear
them coming now. What an awful sound, a
tearing and scraping. Screaming and fire
everywhere. An ungodly awful smell. I grab the bat and crouch down low near the
ground. My father crushes himself into a
ball, I try to pull his head up by his hair, but he is rigid and locked up, his
face buried in folds of his old loden coat. His whole body is shaking. I want him to save me, but he won’t. He can’t. He is terrified. So am I. But he’s as good as dead if he stays
here. Everyone has left but the two of
us. I stand up to run and try to drag
him after me by his collar.. He is too
heavy and too paralyzed with fear. He makes no sound but a whimper.
I wish with
all my heart and soul to wake and find this is a dream.
Later,
exhausted, my chest hurting from the hard breathing and running, I let myself
collapse into a pile in the doorway of a burned out sporting goods store. I roll up in the thick coat. Moments or hours later I awaken because of a
sound I can’t identify, I jump up screaming and lose it for a few seconds. I
stop myself and take deep breaths. But I
don’t know if I heard something or dreamed
it. After a few minutes I decide
it was a dream. If it was them, I’d be dead by now. And then I remember the
sound, exactly. It was my father
screaming as the blows landed on him, each destroying one part of him at a
time.
Maybe I
won’t die. Maybe I can stay alive
somehow. I’m thirteen, strong and smart.
I really am lucky. The old woman went
down with one swing of the bat when I stole her box of graham crackers. And my father’s warm coat still has the winter lining zipped in.
copyright 2011 David
Griffin
The Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, SC
