[Alright, I would like to clear something up here first. When I write stories, my style varies according to the narrator. In this story, the style is meant to characterize the protagonist's innocence and permanent childishness.
WARNING: this story (though this is only the first part) deals with parental abuse.]
The first time paramedics came and picked me up in an ambulance, I didn’t feel anything emotionally. The last time they came for me, I was embarrassed. I smelled like urine, vomit and blood, and, they said, I was acting silly because I had been put on an IV. Also, the first time I was completely silent. I didn’t want to tell them anything, and they didn’t make me. This time, they brought in detectives.
I’m on my medical bed and I watch them shuffle into the hospital room. They are dressed normally, contradicting my assumptions of their attire being trench coats and ties and whatnot. One is named Officer Dan Rose; I read that on his badge-thing. He is tall, but very overweight, and as I notice this, I am immediately reminded of donuts. The other is shorter, but much more lean and muscular. His name is Officer Rick Dawson. He has a rather mean look about him.
I’m scared to talk to them. I know she is as good as dead, but after years and years being told that if I tell anyone she’d kill me…It’s stuck there. Not only that, but I don’t want to talk about it. I know this is the end of everything, and I don’t want to go back to it. Not ever. I just don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want policemen to be here. There is only one person I want to see. But I won’t be able to see him until later.
I ignore them at first. I stare up at the ceiling like I have been all day, and try to make out little pictures in the tile. I look at the white walls, and blink at their brightness. The sunlight that is streaming in through the window reflects off them so strongly, it hurts your eyes sometimes. It seems like a nice day outside, though. The sun is bright and there are only a few clouds in the sky. There is a bathroom off to my right with the door open, and I stare at the mirror. All I can see in it is the wall. Finally I look at them.
Both men give me big, fake grins and pull the scratchy visitor chairs up to my bed. “Hey there, I’m Officer Dan, and this is Officer Rick,” the chunky man says. I stare at them silently. I am in too much pain to talk or nod. “How are you?” He asks. I give no reply. He waits for a few seconds and then says, “Okay, well…Do you mind if we just get right to it?” Again, I say nothing. He understands that as a ‘yes’. Officer Rick is completely silent. He watches me closely. “Owen Ritchie, that’s your name, right?” I manage the smallest of nods. He grins at his success.
“Well, Owen, looks like you have been through a rough time.” He takes a moment to examine me, and I have to look away. I suddenly feel so embarrassed, although I don’t know why. It’s not like I got this way by tripping down the stairs. I can feel him looking at all of the bruises on my face and scalp, the millions of scratches that cover my arms and the tiny dots of blood that have seeped through all of my stitches and now litter my hospital gown along my stomach. I can almost sense him imagining what my body must look like under that gown. What pain I must be in.
He doesn’t even understand.
After a soft hiss of sympathy, he looks at my eyes again and I am forced to look back. “How did this all start, Owen? Do you remember? I mean, when it all started.” I figure he won’t be expecting an answer right away, considering I’ve been silent this whole time. So, I take the time to consider what I might say. Will I tell him everything? Will all of it be the truth? I can’t even tell. I bet that a lot of it will be lies. I don’t want to lie to them. But I’m sure I will.
“I don’t remember,” I choke out quietly. The lies have already begun. I do remember how it all started. I remember the first time my mother hit me. I remember everything.
*******
I was four years old when my mother showed the very first signs of her hatred towards me. My father was playing with me and bouncing me on his knee. I loved my father so much. He loved me too, and I believe that is why my mom hates me. Because she hated him. Anyway, I was laughing and bouncing and he was laughing and playing, and all of a sudden, she stormed into the room and screamed, “What are you doing?! He needs to learn how to work!”
“But, Lily-”
She snatched me up before he could retort. “He needs to learn how to work,” She repeated, this time in a dangerous voice. All my life I lived on the same, small animal farm. Both my mother and father loved animals. We owned over thirty animals at our peak. I don’t think she really thought I needed to learn how to work- I was four years old, I couldn’t do much. But she didn’t want me to be around my dad. She hated it when we had fun together.
She held me across the stomach so that my body draped over her arm. I’ve always been a very small person. I’m only five feet, two inches at the age of sixteen. Imagine me as a baby. My eyes were wide and I stared at my dad, confused and totally helpless. I had no idea what was going on, so I tugged at her arm. I want to be let down. I wanted to play! She spanked me harshly and I screamed. The tantrum washed over me like a huge tidal wave. I bawled and screamed at her to let me down. My dad was standing now, but he wasn’t moving. Later on in life, I learned he was too scared to ever stop her.
She carried me outside, and the moment I felt the fresh breeze graze my cheek I calmed down. I took a deep breath in, smelling the crisp autumn air, and went limp in her arms. I’ve always liked the outdoors. She carried me over to the pig sty, where I saw one fat pig picking on the runt. I could tell that the peaceful air had calmed my mother down too. She set me down in the pen and told me in an indifferent voice, “Get them to stop.”
I walked over to the bully pig and placed my hand on his back. He ignored me. “Hey,” I said, “Stop that.” He kept on biting, nipping, and kicking the other little pig. I frowned. I did not like this whole bullying thing. So, I grabbed the big pig’s floppy ear, lifted it up and leaned in, yelling, “STOP THAT!”
When I heard my mom gasp, I looked up at her. Her expression will forever be imprinted in my mind. Her brows were furrowed so deeply they almost touched, and her mouth was open in an ‘o’ shape. Something glistened in her eyes and, although I didn’t know what it was then, it scared me. Later, I came to realize that it was a tear of hatred. She leaned over the wooden fence and lifted up my arm by the wrist. I watched her raise up her arm. I didn’t know what was happening until I was lying in the mud of the sty, crying and clutching the newly forming bruise on my side.
She picked me up by my shirt and shook me violently. “That is not how we treat animals, do you hear?” I cried and nodded. She looked at me with disgust. Mud covered half of my face and was tangled all in my hair. She dragged me inside to get cleaned up. My dad was never told about that incident. But I swear, when she was carrying me inside, I glanced at the window and thought I saw a tall, sad figure looking longingly at me through the fogged glass.
******
“You don’t remember,” Officer Dan’s voice has a hint of disappointment in it. Officer Rick shifts in his seat and I start to wonder if he knows I lied. Can he see it in me? I don’t think so. So many of these lies I have convinced myself are true, that I hardly know my own past anymore. But deep down, I know everything that happened, and everything that is my imagination.
“What do you remember?” He asks softly.
“My father,” I barely answer. For a moment, he is confused. Wasn’t it my mother that hit me? I decide to clear things up, “He loved me.” Officer Dan nods.
“He died, is that correct? In the September Eleventh attacks?” I nod very slowly. Tears fill my eyes because I miss my dad so much. Officer Dan notices and looks at me with utter sympathy, but officer Rick is the one that touches my hand gently. I’m so surprised that I look at him directly; he still doesn’t say anything, but I can see it in his eyes that he knows how I feel. Did he lose someone then too? Who was it? A father, a brother, a wife, or girlfriend? I feel a connection with him, an ease in both his and my tension. I see a tiny, faint smile tug at the corners of his lips; I mirror it. Officer Dan has absolutely no idea what is going on. He states blankly at me.
Finally, Officer Rick’s hand retreats back to his lap and Dan snaps out of his stupor, “What do you remember about him? What happened when he died; how did you feel and act?” I breathe in a shaky sigh, wincing at the sharp pain in my ribs. I think back to my father, back to the moment I learned he died.
******
I was sitting in the living room, watching a cartoon show with wide, interested eyes and a grin. I didn’t get to watch TV often , and when I did, I had to be torn away. It was the Saturday cartoons. An episode of Tom&Jerry had just finished. It consisted of their never ending chase, and Tom inevitably ended up with an iron burn print on his face, his whiskers all bent and sizzling. Pepé le Pew was now slinking around the streets of France, the tip of his skunk tail poking out over trash cans and making people faint with his smell. I let out a laugh when the green smell wafted into the nostrils of an upright woman and her poodle, causing both of them to fall.
I heard a squeal from the kitchen where my mother was reading the mail, but I didn’t look away from the screen. She skipped into the room, jumped in front of the TV and turned it to a news channel. She picked me up underneath the arms, her palm pressing roughly against a bruise on my left side, causing me to whine. Thankfully, she didn’t hear.
My mother spun me around (although I was eleven years old, I was still a tiny boy) and hugged me closed. “What happened?” I asked.
She shrieked, “He’s head! He’s dead! Ha ha ha.” I was so incredibly confused. She kept on talking, saying how ‘it’ was all hers and she could do whatever she wanted. But I was trying to figure out what was going on. Who died? How did he die, and where? Why was she hugging me and treating me like this? She never did this sort of thing.
Not to me, anyway. She treated my sister well and my brother the best. I was beginning to get the feeling that she was training him. Training Brennan to be just as manic, just as dangerous as she. One time, she had him watch as she sprayed multiple inhalants up my nostrils until I passed out. From the next year on, I had so much trouble comprehending math, that I had to have a special tutor. I still didn’t understand it.
“Who is dead?” I asked.
“That oaf that lived here!” She giggled at her freedom to call him what she wanted.
“Brennan?” I was trying to be naïve, and it seemed to be working. She sent me a glare that was returned with my practiced look of utter innocence.
“No, you idiot. Your stupid father.” Her voice was low and taunting as she spoke this news slowly. She wanted me to be hurt; she knew I would be. She wanted it to be bad as possible. The temperature in the room dropped to somewhere in the negatives. I felt cold inside and out, and sick. I thought I was going to throw up all over her. She giggled again when my face fell, spinning me around with joy. Again she shrieked, “He’s dead! Yay! This place is mine! It’s al mine, Owen is all mine!” I don’t know why she said my name. She had another son, and at the time, one daughter. She set me down and danced with me. She was so happy to learn of her freedom.
I, on the other hand, was devastated. We danced and danced, But I hated it. I hated her. Have you ever actually hated someone? And every time you see them, you can feel your heart go black and cold and the only think you can think of is your triumph as they lay twisted and broken on the floor? I have. That was how I felt towards my mom from that moment on. In my dreams I saw her screaming in pain and delusional with some deadly poison. I wished so hard that she was the one who was dead.
I wrenched my wrists away from her and ran to the TV, watching names roll by on the bottom of screen. Where they names of the dead or the survivors? Pictures and video clips showed ruins, bodies and faced. I imagined that I saw my father as each on of those people. A dead face beneath ruble: my father. A survivor on a stretcher with an IV: my father. A fireman searching the debris: my father. He was everything but wasn’t anywhere. He was gone. Dead. Dead to my mother, dead to his friends. I was the only one who knew he was still alive. He was still with me.
The only thought in my head was, ‘What will happen to me now?’
