The pain of last week’s story was worth it. With this one, I felt like things were falling into place.
Thanks for reading.
Artwork by Adam J. Middleton
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zOdqDD
DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
The walls seemed to close in. David stretched his hands out to his sides to push the wheelchair down the hallway, himself in it. The handrims were cold, the footrest, too, but it was the only place he could put his feet.
Another push and his fingernails pulled free a strip of the dead wallpaper that lay brittle and torn, a mysterious force of nature keeping the rest affixed to the wood boards beneath. No plaster to hide critters, a family of spiders fled to the gaps between the boards.
David hugged his arms to his chest and tucked his hands into his armpits where no spider dared go. Jimmy had joked as much, David being the first to produce that sour musk Dad carried around with him everywhere.
When he felt safe, David brought his hands back out but didn’t sniff his fingers. He thought he might cry if he did, and not from the smell. He grinned, knowing Jimmy would have said the smell was the culprit, then gone on and called him Onion Boy or Pits of Eternal Funk, and not the music kind, he would have specified.
Still some ways to go until David hit the fork in the hallway, he braved his hands to the walls again, giving himself a good shove. The wheels locked to the grooves in the floor, he was on rails. He threw his arms up as the fine hair of his bangs lifted, imagining himself on a rollercoaster, the kind he and Jimmy used to ride at the fair. The Minecart Massacre it was called, and when the carnie asked why he should let a kid who couldn’t walk on a rollercoaster, Jimmy had simply replied: Who better to ride in a minecart than a kid used to wheels. The carnie had shown all his teeth at that, the ones he had left anyway, and gave them a two-fer for being so clever. Well, Jimmy that was. Always the clever one.
The chair wasn’t a minecart, and there was no massacre when David reached the fork. A calendar stripped of all months except the final one was pinned too high for him to tear off. He couldn’t look away from that fat-marker circle right around the 15. A Thursday. Jimmy loved Thursday because it was named after Thor, his favorite god. Mom would slap his hand when he’d say that. She was too afraid to do anything else. Dad would just shout blasphemer! in the best impression of Pastor Wheland until they all fell into laughter. Even Mom.
David hung a right, done with the date that would come to pass without Jimmy, so what it signified didn’t mean anything to him anymore.
David faced all of Heaven’s glory and brought his arms up to shield his face. The wheelchair caught where the doorframe met the wall. It took some time for his eyes to adjust to the window that should have been closed. Jimmy liked it dark and cool, and God knew the sun beat down something fierce out here most of the year. Today fell into that most of the year part.
Sweat sprung up all over David, sticking his shirt and pants to him in such a way that made his skin crawl. He’d pick a part off just to have it fall back in an even ickier way. It was as if he were the walls of this crumbling house and spiders were crawling out from between his ribs to torment him endlessly.
The bedroom walls were just as bad. Cracked, peeling, and everything in between. The only decoration was the crucifix Jimmy had decapitated to look more like Thor’s hammer. Too high to reach, Jimmy had said it was for his own good, because he was the only one strong enough to wield it. And what would Mom think if she knew her son had that kind of power?
“Blasphemer!” David shouted not to the makeshift Thor’s hammer but to the window, where Heaven wanted nothing more than to blind him, but he didn’t blink. No, he didn’t blink. He let the heat dry his tears. They didn’t even make it far enough to salt his cheeks.
David punched the mussed bed. Angry dust shot up in clouds that made him hack and spit. Wheeze after all that was done.
“Blasphemer!” David called to the window again, this time tears too plentiful to be dried. Or maybe it feared him, that pure light that had done nothing but bleach and rot this house for years. Nothing at all like what Mom said God and Heaven did. David didn’t believe in it anyway. He and Jimmy could have gone lizard hunting on the flats or played chicken with Monroe and his wheelbarrow. But no, Sundays were sacred. And what had they done other than make them wake up earlier and suffer through a storybook for grownups?
David raised his hand, which had become a fist, trained it at the window, and–
“Davey!”
His arm was held by a force stronger than any god, even Thor. Mom.
She had no words for him, just the look of a mother, which was better anyway. She gave his hand and arm back, and he turned away from the light. He didn’t flinch when she touched his arm.
She knelt beside him, and for a long time, he didn’t look, couldn’t, knew he had to muster up a tight-lipped grimace.
But Mom’s face broke down all his walls, and he was a child again, unable to fight her off. Unable to run away.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go get you cleaned up.”
David had heard those words so many times before, mostly when he and Jimmy had come home from a day of adventure. But he had never heard it in the singular. Never.
David stood up, took Mom’s hand, and let her guide him out of the room and down the hall to a kitchen with a warm washrag.
Leave a Reply