Shooting Stars And Chemistry

Joe heard them before he saw them.
His mother and her new…leech came stumbling up the path and burst open the front door.

Joe put down the knife he had been using to chop vegetables, laying it carefully within his fingers grasp…just in case.

“Honey! How come you are still up? Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Angela slurred in the direction of her son

Suppressing a growl he replied, “Mom it’s six in the morning, I’m getting dinner ready for tonight.”

Angela’s boyfriend Derek hated kids. He realized that Jake, or James or whoever he was wasn’t exactly a child, but he liked him no more because of it.

“You sassing your mother boy? She said to go to bed. Don’t they teach you respect at school anymore?”

Angela looked dreamily up into Derek’s eyes and said, “He doesn’t go to school anymore baby.”

“Ah so you’re a drop out huh? Scabbing off your mother’s good nature eh?”

“No. I work to keep a roof over her head.”

Derek wasn’t an entirely patient man, he was even less so when he was intoxicated. His life was based entirely around drink, so he was virtually never tolerant.

“You think she needs an ass like you when she has me? I’m the man of this house now!”

“No!” roared Joe grabbing the knife, “You don’t know jack about this family, you only come back here to screw my mother and eat our food!”

“Joe-" Angela interrupted, but Derek silenced her next words by taking Joe by the throat and pinning him against the wall.

“I am the man of this house! You better get used to it!”

Smirking lightly Joe wheezed out, “You seriously think that you are the only one that she brings home?”

With a roar mimicking that of a bull Derek pulled back a meaty fist and punched Joe directly in the nose, and then repeated the blow over various parts of his face.
It was only when he began to notice blood on his body, that didn’t belong to Joe did he stop.

“What the?-“ Derek yelled when he saw scarlet billows pouring over his stomach.

In Joe’s hand was a large kitchen knife, with ruby beads dripping from the tip.
Stumbling to the ground Angela flew to his side screaming to Joe,

“Why the hell did you do that?!”

“Mom he almost killed me right here and you didn’t do anything to get the ass off me! How can you defend him right now?” Joe yelled at his sobbing mother.

“Yeah and now you’ve gone and killed h-him! G-get out! N-now!”

“Fine! I will! Don’t blame me when he kills you too!”

Storming off to his room he grabbed his backpack out from under his bed and started throwing things haphazardly into it.
He stopped only to look at the picture of his mother holding a little baby in her arms in a hospital bed, a man at her side looking down at her so his face was obscured.

Joe picked it up and surveyed the only family he had ever known. He kept that picture by his bed as it reminded him of the only time he and his mother must have been happy. And it was the only evidence that he actually had a father. Sure there had been other players in his Mom’s life, but they never “fit the bill” as she would say.

Hot anger bubbled up inside him until he couldn’t even look at the picture anymore. Throwing it across his room, it hit the door and it landed face down, glass smashed.

Walking over it with his backpack on his shoulder he stepped down as hard as he could.
That picture still lies there to this day, never to be looked at again.