Cracking

[This short story is completely and entirely fictional! Thank you. Enjoy!]

I am a victim of many things. To draw a simple conclusion, I am humanized. I am made up of skin, blood, bones and genetic strands of DNA. To state the obvious, I am nothing special. I’m nothing more than a structure of creation. I am only a boy, only a child. I have legitimate fears, but I am a strong believer in happiness lurking in shadows. I have seen happiness, but feeling it is rare. Happiness splatters dark ink across my bedroom wall and I smile in my sleep.


When I was very young my mother would pull me into her lap. She would look down into my eyes, through my eyes, and into my soul. She would stroke my cheek lightly and tell me dark things in a soft voice. Her words were like an open wound, gaping, dripping and pulsing. She spoke horribly to me, in my childhood, things intended to hurt me. Nothing in life is ever concrete. And even if it were, concrete dries out; it crumbles and cracks into the finest of dust. Sitting there, upon her lap, my eyes would darken and colors of light would fade, in and out, in and out. I remember feeling negativity from her fingertips, hatred from her palms, and disgust from her grip on my neck.


I live in a small room, on a hard bed, with four white walls for company. Downstairs, and a little to the left, sits my mother on a very old, wooden rocking chair. You can always hear the incline, and decline of her rock throughout the entire house. It is the creaking and groaning of retired wood under the weight of the heartless. And this is my home, this is my life, this is all I know. Every day is the same. Whenever I open my eyes, in a natural waking state, I close them again and pray for the shadow of death to consume me. My father is gone, and has been gone, and will always be gone. He will never come back. I live in this house, dusty, dirty, and unpolished. I live with my mother, my abuser.


Love is unreal to me. It hides from me, it plays games with my head, and it taunts me in sleep enriched with dreams. I follow it into meadows, caves, and valleys deep within majestic, purple mountains. I carry a butterfly net in a repeating dream of mine, and I swing away at the swirling intangible. Tiny, red hearts float above me, in a golden, sparkling trail in beautiful, blue winds. 


I awake from bizarre dreams in a frantic jolt. I never catch the love that floats behind my eyelids; I never hold it in my hands, I never feel it with my fingertips, with my beating heart. I am deprived from any real connection, any happiness, or love that one might bring another. I lay in bed breathing sharply, examining the ceiling with intense focus, trying hard to keep my mind from unraveling itself. I send violent chills down my spine with every thought of my unrealistic dreams. And finally, my thoughts slip away. At this point, my breathing slows, and tears spill from my eyelids, into puddles on my bed sheets. My insides start to ooze from my nasal cavity, snot and warm metallic blood. And everyday I wipe my nose with the back of my unwashed hand.


There was a beautiful girl, who sat in a desk not far from mine, in school. Her eyes were like pools of blue and gray, deep, inviting, and synced with every animated emotion she felt. I thought I might interest her with words, but topic of discussion had evaded me. My thoughts were plagued entirely by the magic of her body painted into her desk. She was a beautiful sight to see in every single moment of her existence, a picture worth a golden frame. I desperately craved her attention in any way I could possibly receive it. Sometimes I would drum my fingers on my desk, sometimes I whistled softly, or I’d pop my gum. One day, I snapped my pencil in half. Here in my hands lay two pieces of wood and graphite, the key pieces of my efforts to be noticed by the beautiful girl. I slid out of my desk and noiselessly made my way to the front of the classroom. At this point, a room full of quiet boys and girls would raise their heads up to watch as I inserted the shard of pencil into the silver sharpener adorning the wall. And what is magic? The snap, crackle and pop of a magician’s wand? Is it the mesmerized crowd as the coiled snake rises up from a turban, by the tune of a flute? Or is magic defined by the feeling of adrenaline that shot through my body like an electric shock? Magic was a question answered only by the smile on her face that pierced me.


I never think about my heart. It is an organ, it pumps blood, and it dwells deep within my body. I never put much thought into things until they haunt me. Spiders of thoughts will creep into my mind and spin their webs. The spider’s legs pluck the webs of my brain like strings of a guitar. Natural vibration occurs, and instantly, I am haunted by my own horrific memory. I do not usually allow my mind to wander inside of itself.  I don’t want to think of many things, do many things, or try to understand why my mother hates me so much. I have given up on her, though I desperately want to love. I want to love someone deeply, until my heart aches with heavy and real, unconditional love. I want someone to pick up my hand and squeeze it, drain the blood from my knuckles, turn it bone white, never let go, and run with me. Run with me as far back as the horizon, float with me into the sky, reach the burning sun, our skin will melt, your hand in mine, together we’ll die as one, happy, loved, and free.


On the day I sharpened my pencil, I found my heart. It rests in a cage of broken bones. It beats slowly, and often at times, I wish it would just stop like the hands of a broken clock. On the day I sharpened my pencil, my heart fluttered, throbbed and raced in a flurry of excitement. I could feel the butterflies from my dreams inside me, their wings frantically scratching away at my stomach lining. My skin was crawling with spiders of thoughts, and tiny beads of adrenaline busted at the seams. I am powerless to the way this girl has made me feel. I cannot make sense of anything, for my eyes are struggling to peel away from her. I am in a very deep ocean, and I am slipping away, I am going under, and I am drowning. Sharks are flicking their tails and circling me, their eyes are hungry, and their teeth are curious. I am edible and alone on the ocean floor. But every single drop of water from this ocean enters my lungs. The ocean is inside me, the sharks are inside me, the slimy seaweed, the angel fish, the sand, the coral reef, the rocks, and even wooden rowboats, all shoved into my body. I dig my dirty fingernails into to my throat, gasping for air, but it is impossible to breathe past the ocean that has crammed itself into my lungs.


I am very cold atop the crisp, white hospital bed sheets. I can hear footsteps, water dripping endlessly, tiny mechanical beeps, and the whispers of doctors and nurses in white coats. There were a few things that happened in my classroom on the day that I sharpened my pencil. As I grinded my jagged pencil inside the machinery, the beautiful girl looked up from her papers and studied my face with her pools of blue and gray. Her eyes were magnetic and attached to my metal skin. Her rosy lips curled up into a crinkled smile and her pools of blue and gray were dancing! I could not take my eyes off of her, my head was dizzy, but I couldn’t look away. My heart felt as if it had been cracked open with every emotion maxed out a hundred times, or more. Hot, sticky, crimson blood gushes out of me, it pours over my insides like warm, maple syrup atop a steaming plate of buttered pancakes.  I could not contain my excitement, I could not contain my feelings, and they overwhelmed me. I collapsed to the linoleum classroom floor, where I fainted. When my teacher drained her jug of ice water over my head in an attempt to save me, the  spiders plagued me with thoughts of swallowing the ocean in its entirety.


This is a lovely hospital. There is connection here between every human. I am drawn to their warm handshakes, the smiles plastered onto their shining faces, the way their hugs solidify their closeness, their love, and their emotion. I always saw hospitals to be a sad picture, heart wrenching, grief-stricken, troublesome and uncomfortable. But in this place, I feel welcome, and personal to the doctors that treat me. I am in a very fine hospital, the finest of institutions for the unstable minds. On any before this day, I would have told you that I never belonged here. I would have told you that my life is hard to live, but that insanity has not yet swallowed me whole. I take small, white, chalky pills, with warm tap water every hour to keep the spiders of thoughts from plaguing my mind. The spiders have packed up their webs, and have moved on from me, I am assured. I still do not feel crazy but I suppose the ones that truly belong here, are the ones who feel perfectly normal despite knowing very deep down inside, they are the complete opposite.


Allow me to bring you into the light, at a very quick pace. My name is Gavin, and I am seven years old. I have never been loved by my mother and my father was brutally murdered by my mother’s sister, Jane. Whenever I was born, I could hardly see. Everything was blurry from the time of my birth to age six. The doctors told my mother I would probably go blind by the time I turned three. Fortunately, I did not go blind, not in the least. In these days of my life, I can see all too clearly. I often ask myself if it would have been better to just have gone blind. I have seen things that no child should ever grow up watching. I have watched my father beat my mother. I have watched my mother cry. I have watched my mother cut herself and ruin her dresses with blood. I have watched my father stumble into our house, drunk, cursing and laughing wildly almost every single night. I have watched my father betray my mother with her sister, Jane. I have watched my mother catch him. I have watched my mother screaming with pain, clutching her heart, falling to the earth, tears streaming, as her husband cheated on her. I have watched Jane react in embarrassment. I have watched Jane’s wild eyes pierce my father with regret. I have watched Jane witness what she has done to her sister. I have watched Jane pull the trigger on a gun, and shoot my father dead. I have watched Jane being dragged out of our house by her hair, in the clutches of my mother’s grip. I have watched police officers arrest my aunt, and take her away. I have watched men enter my home, place my father in a zip-up bag, and carry him out the front door. And for every single day since then, I have taken the beatings my mother gives me. I deserve this, she tells me. I could have done something, she says. I could have changed the course of our history. Our lives are fucked because of me, she tells me, over and over, and over. Her hand across my face, her fingers tight around my neck, I black out on the tiled floor, and wake up in a pool of my own vomit and blood.


Eight years later, I still carry the body of an insane boy. I keep telling myself that I’ll be alright, that things will change, that I am a better person because of the way my mother treated me for seven years. After the police took my aunt Jane away, and my dead father’s body, they started investigating me and my mother. I don’t know how they found out, but they knew she was abusing me. I suppose my blackened eyes, my broken ribs, my cracked knuckles, and my sputtering cough that drew up blood, could have easily given her away. I had just always assumed they would have accused me of doing this all to myself. For seven years of my wretched life, I lived an unimaginable nightmare. I was only a child; I believed every word spilled from my mother’s cracked and bleeding lips. She told me that she would always love me if I never told anyone what she was doing to me. I was only seven years old. Seven years old, and my heart felt empty. I wanted more than anything to fill it up with something real, even if I had to go through the agonizing pain delivered by my creator.


Hours would pass. Some beatings took a harder toll on my childhood body more than others. On the nights that I blacked out, my mother would leave me on the floor to sleep. In the dead of the quiet night, my crusted eyes would pry themselves open, to reveal blurred images of a dark, black room and dusty lamplight. My mother will have gone to bed long ago, and I feel safe to get up and travel the staircase to my sanctuary. My bruised, beaten legs feel like soggy pieces of wood, under the weight of the world. I feel broken all over. I feel broken inside, outside, sideways, left and right. Every part of me is ripped open, torn apart, bleeding and hollow. But I travel the staircase with slow, easy steps. I wheeze in the icy air, and breathe out a throaty, gurgling cough. I’m grasping the wall for support, I’m pulling, and stretching, and climbing the world’s biggest mountain. Atop this mountain, I am now in the world’s longest hallway. I am practically crawling now, to make it to my bedroom. I pull myself up with any strength I can manage, and slide into the crack of my bedroom door. I don’t even touch this door, I don’t even turn the knob, and the door is already ajar. There is just enough room for my body to slide right in. This was planned; this was all set and ready for my arrival. The opening and closing of any doors in this house could wake the sleeping monster. Once inside my room, I feel free, but dizzy and sick. Buckling over where I stand, I vomit up old food, blood, and stomach lining onto the floor. Now it is finally time to sleep. Lying on my bed feels unreal to me. I feel an unsure happiness, but I’m convinced the beatings are done for tonight. A surge of energy exits my body, and I enter my repeated dreams.


Tonight’s dreams are filled with cherry blossoms, and sugar plum fairies dancing under the light of the moon. I can hear babbling brooks, and children laughing around the warmest, crackling fire. Stars align the night sky with complex patterns and designs. And here is my swirling intangible; I reach out to it, as I do in every dream. Tonight, I catch it with my hands. I can feel love, warmth, and happiness. It is in my hands as I repeatedly stab my knife into her flesh. There is no dream to repeat, not tonight. I have made my dreams reality. I tear into my mother’s skin, and her screams are worse than the sound of the knife cracking through bone and tissue. It is a fleshy, slurping sound that fills the night air, after my mother finally dies. The knife is kissing her insides, and sucking her blood. I stuck it deep into her heart, draining it of its contents, a dusty, black hole. I sling the blood of her insides across the room, laughing with delight. Finally, happiness splatters dark ink across my bedroom wall and tonight, I will smile in my sleep.


They say that right before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes. That every single birthday party you ever had, the cake, the balloons, the party hats and gifts, all of your memories of growing up, good and bad, pops and flashes in front of yourself as if it’s being fast forwarded on a giant movie screen. I cannot tell you if this is true, but perhaps we could ask my mother when we all depart in her direction.


I am a victim of many things, my mother’s death being one. To fully understand my side of the story, you must first realize that I am not a bad person, I am simply humanized. Everyone makes mistakes. My mother died because of hers, and after all, I was always her biggest mistake.