Word Count: 461
Sometimes the anger comes up so bitter and caustic that I’m afraid my stomach will come out my mouth. I imagine it happening, spitting out bile in his face, having it melt his features like acid, his eyes running into his cheeks, down his jaw, dripping onto the last gasp of his chest. And I wish for it. With all my heart.
Harold K. Smith. Sounds like a banker or lawyer or leather-assed executive in a corner office fifty floors up into the sky. Harold Smith is no such person. He is a predator, an abuser, scum. He is my father.
I was about seven when he started in on me. Ran away after the very first time. Even that young, I knew it was bad, that he was bad, not me. Never could understand how some kids hang around for years, not speaking up, speared and battered and speared. Then maybe, because Harold K. Smith was not offering love, this was not hush, Daddy loves you, but pure hatred that drove him. By the age of ten I had run away from home two dozen times. And returned.
Tell someone, they say, tell anyone; your mother, your teacher, your priest. I did. My mother told him and I got beaten real badly before he shoved and grunted behind me. The teacher didn’t believe me and said she’d speak with my mother so I told her I’d lied. The priest told me to pray. And I kept running away and the police kept bringing me back. My home was clean and well kept. My neighborhood was middle-class green lawned and maple treed. No one believed a man who could afford a nice house like we had, had a wife who planted petunias in hanging baskets around the porch, no one believed that such a home with freshly starched curtains at blue-shuttered windows could hold such things inside.
He left me alone when I started high school. I think he just liked little kids. I went away to college and never came back.
Until he called to say my mother had died. I asked him how he had found me. He laughed. A few years later the hospital called. Said he’d told them he had a son. Harold K. Smith.
Here he is, each breath dragging on sand. He cannot talk, he’s drugged for the pain. I want to pull out the tubes, stop it into silence. And even now, fear keeps me from actually doing it. Fear of not him; he’s a useless wisp of skeleton that’s not even aware that I’m here. Fear instead of alarms, lights and buzzers and bells that would bring everyone running to save him.
As if he’s the one that needs saving.
