For a moment it was all he could do not to fling his door open wide, barrel down the narrow hallway, and slam his sixty-five-pound frame into his father. He wanted to pummel his father’s angular face with his fists and swing his arms until he could no longer lift them. He wanted to strike him until the hatred had drained from his body, like a torrent of acid, and his father’s head was a pile of mush on the floor. He wanted to save his mother, and himself, with all the fiber of his being; but instead, he moved quietly across his small room to the abraded desk that sat in the far corner near the window.
Now that his father was finally drinking, Lance felt secure enough to write. He pulled out a thick spiral notebook with a flawless blue cover from the drawer beneath the surface of the desk along with a black pen, and began to flip through the pages. He passed nearly fifty pages of roughly lined prose before he found an empty page.
The poems that had begun to flow out of his pens and pencils nearly six months ago were scary. They were dark in ways that he didn’t yet understand, and if asked, couldn’t form into words, but he wrote them. They were his lifeline. The words acted as a safety valve for his anger and hatred, which mortared him solid emotionally.
But they scared him too.
He had made the mistake of jotting down a poem in class one day after stumbling upon his mother’s unconscious form sprawled in the hallway the night before. He was only halfway finished when Mrs. Murphy, his teacher, had walked silently up behind him, as she had an uncanny way of doing, and read what he was writing. That afternoon he had sat next to his mother in the principal’s office, listening to the two adults speak about his poem as though he weren’t present.
Disturbing and worrying were two of the many words that crossed the air between his mother and the principal, who sat leaning over his large desk like a news anchor delivering some especially devastating bulletin. Counseling had also been brought up, but Lance could see from the way his mother’s face drew tight at the thought that it was out of the question. A counselor might ask certain things or glean some sort of insight that might lead to the truth, and the truth was a dangerous thing, especially in their household.
During the car ride home that day, his mother had asked him why he wrote about such scary things, and even then Lance wondered why she needed to ask.
“Because it helps” was all he could respond. She had nodded as she stared over the steering wheel of their 1983 Plymouth Caravelle, her auburn hair a deep honey color in the late-spring sunlight. Lance had stared at her then, locking the memory in place, not because it was a happy moment that he would later drag out like a worn book of photos, but because he had never seen her look so pretty before. She wore no bruises on her faintly lined face, and she wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t frowning either. She was real, there next to him in the seat, and at that moment it was the best he could ask for. Later in life he would reflect upon that moment and think that he should have hated her too. Perhaps he should have hated her more than he did his father because she could have done something. She could have called the police or a neighbor, or at least neglected to cover her welts in public in order to draw some sort of attention. But he knew, deep down, she couldn’t have done anything different, no more than his father could have. She fit perfectly into the puzzle of despair that they called their life.
Lance squinted into the deepening night and tried to make out the familiar forms of the small shed that sat several yards from the house and of the deeper shadow of the barn that hovered over its smaller cohort like a monolith. Lance imagined all of the farm equipment sitting in the dark, indifferent to all else except rust and time. He wished he were more like some of the machines, cold and hard and without feeling.
He listened to the sound of a beer can being crushed and then tossed at the trashcan that sat in the corner of the kitchen. As the sound faded, rustling of clothing, which signaled his mother’s rise from the floor, replaced it. Lance began to write.
The dark holds me close
I swing from its arms
It knows my name and kisses my face
If I can’t breathe it’s okay
I don’t want to
My skin is cold and hard
And the dark holds me close