Songbird

Some words taste like fireworks, like the candy we used to get children, which sizzled and popped as soon as you put them in your mouth. You could hear them pit pattering against your cheek, could feel the zing of tiny rockets flying within. Then, there are some words, that whisper off the tongue like mist sliding against the forest floor. Slowly, softly, they travel the unknown. There is always a flavor though, a flavor to each deception, to all sweet, bitter, salty, lies.

The first lie he was told as a child, “We are only doing this for you”.

The words fell from their tongues and bit into his skin, drawing blood. He ignored them everytime. His father always called him Isaac, but he never like the sound of his name. Atleast, not when it came from his tongue, it was too sharp, like glass breaking, or maybe it was his father’s voice that made it sound so brittle.

“Come Isaac, come”. Always a beckoning, always an order, always for him.

He remembers his mother having soft, doe eyes.He can never remember their exact color though. Sometimes he creates a story of his life, but then decides he doesn’t like the ending. So he creates a story of someone else, another Isaac, in another life, with a living mother of soft, beautiful eyes and a father who speaks his name in a way that doesn’t shatter his eardrums. Then he forces himself to wake up to reality, like swallowing a bitter pill. Tough but necessary, it would not do him well to daydream about things he has no control over. That leads to wishing and hoping and a myriad of other useless emotions. Isaac had decided he had no time for useless emotions.

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The first word that comes into his head whe he sees his stepmother, the woman his father brought as his mom’s replacement, is gaunt. Her cheekbones stick out from her face, skin stretched taut on her bones. She is thin, ugly thin and she’s proud of it. Her face is pale most days and her gold brown hair hangs limply from her head. She seemed half dead most of the time, always getting thinner and thinner, but then who was he to judge.

“Isaac! Go fetch my bags from the car” Her shrill voice, muffled by the door to her bedroom, is still commanding enough to get him to move.

He walks silently, shuffling his feet, counts the steps it takes to go from the upstairs floor to the garage, forty three.He carries the overflowing bag of groceries to the kitchen counter, then moves the stuff to their designated places, bread and eggs in the fridge, frozen food and meat in he freezer. He washes the fruits and puts them neatly in a fruit basket on the dining table. Irene, the stepmother, was meticulous about her kitchen and Isaac was meticulous about keeping her happy. If she was happy his dad was happy and if his dad was happy then he would get beat up less frequently.

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Isaac was good at reading people, he understood when people were playing games, when the teacher thought she was being clever by asking a trick question, when the students tried to play pranks on him. He always knew. I guess you could say he had a sixth sense about these things, so when Lina came to him with that gleam in her eyes, he knew.

“And another one bites the dust”, he said.

“How’d you know?”, she asks. He can see the barely controlled mischief in her face

“You have that look Li, the one that says some poor bastard got what was coming to him”

“Well then, if you know everything already, I’m guessing you don’t wanna know all the juicy details? I had soo much fun with this one”, She says, and a big, knowing smile speads across her face.

“I’m sure you’re gonna tell me anyways, so lets get it over with”, he says in a pretend annoyed voice.

Truth was, he was intrigued by all of her “missions”. Her crusades to distribute the justice she never got herself, but he doesn’t tell her that and instead lets her chatter happily as they walk down the school hallway to first period chemistry.