By Tony A. Bowers

Tommy lay in the darkness of his bedroom, tossing softly with his panda bear pillow, struggling to find just the right comfy spot to fall into a deep sleep. Outside his door his mother and father’s voices melted into the crooning of Rick James. It felt like warm honey on Tommy’s ears. The sounds and movements in the living room nudged against the edges of his dark cocoon.

With a twist to the right, Tommy found that spot. He felt himself slipping into the void…

Crash

Sleep fell away from Tommy. The sounds of the front room jaggedly ripped into the bedroom. There were screams and wails, grunts and the sound of crunching glass.

Tommy pushed himself out of bed. Panda pillow cast aside. He opened the door and ran into the hall.

No, No,

Why you make me do that huh, why you make me…

Ugh, Ugh uhh!

Tommy stopped short at the rim of the room. There stood his father crying and muttering to himself, ‘why you make me,’ each word like taffy in his mouth. His shoulders hunched, a jagged gin bottle remnant in his right hand. His left hand was paralyzed into a claw.

His mother was sitting straight like six o’clock in a ripped vinyl kitchen chair. Her face pressed into a fright mask. Lips pulled low, eyes alive with fire. She was drenched to her torso in gin and blood. Her breathing was quick and shallow. It reminded Tommy of a dying bird that had crashed against his window last summer. He watched that bird, each second pulled out into an hour, until that bird’s breathing ceased. He felt cold, wondering if history would repeat. But his mother didn’t stop breathing. The middle of her scalp laid open as if it had been unzipped. The pieces of glass sparkled in her hair like diamonds in the sun.

Tommy couldn’t put into words what he felt at that moment. But he did get a picture in his mind. It was of the time he was left alone on the school playground.

Dusk hung heavy in the air, his mother and father weren’t there to fetch him. All the other kids and adults were gone. He stared at the empty play-lot and shivered. The jungle gym looked like the skeleton of some long dead beast.

Brittle, crunchy leaves blew across the ground, sounding like a cracked baby’s rattle. The metal chain of the swing knocked against the swing set pole,

Cling… chink… cling

That vision sat in his mind as he watched his mom and dad now. He didn’t know it, but the oily residue of these desolate memories would come bubbling up inside of him until the very end of his days.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tony A. Bowers is a Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department MFA graduate.  He has published short stories in Hair Trigger 30, Hair Trigger 31, The Story Week Reader, and several online magazines.