Sid and the Last Five Years

The birds outside wrote a song, and the smell of cold, damp laundry filled the house; the smell of mold. I looked over at the closet, and then glared back at the growing heap of clothing placed on the floor. Stained shirts upon dirty pants, clothes piled and intertwined in a mountain of madness. The clothing absorbed droplets from the leaky ceiling; the smell of mold, an atmosphere that was like a child's swimming pool left from the summer, to rot alone in the fall and winter.

Adam slept hard, he never twitched as I crept into his room and shut off his obnoxious alarm that blared throughout the house. His sweet face with plush tender lips never moved, and I exited his bedroom. He never slept as long as this, his odd sleeping schedules, if I hadn't known any better I'd think he had insomnia. But now he was sleeping, and that's all I could ask for. I was content that he was asleep, having a brother with Smith Magenis could be a pain in the ass sometimes, the constant crying over such a silly, minute issue, his aggressiveness whenever something was wrong, or the outbursts, the tantrums- Oh, the tantrums were the worst.

Mom had left this morning, I heard her car pull out around the early hour of six, just when the sun was beginning to rise and the dew beginning to have that wet, forest smell that is so often does. I didn't have to see her to know she was running on empty; that alcohol was the only reason she wanted to live anymore. She attempted to block all weaknesses from me, as if she weren't that eroding brick wall that would soon tumble down. She knew it and I knew it; she knew I knew it.

It was all because of Dad; and it was because of Mom because of Dad. I didn't feel sympathy for the woman when everything was going swell until she took her drunken addiction to a new level, and made the man snap. Underneath all his evil, I feel sorry for him, because I knew what drove him to that point. And it was the woman sitting at the stools, demanding more, drinking more.

*

I saw him a lot. His lips were always dry and cracked, like a sidewalk that had had heat beaming on it for years on end. His breath wreaked of what smelled like fire. A deep, burning fire it was, embers always slightly alive. When he wasn't breathing it was charcoal. When I didn't give him that fuel, it was charcoal. Those eyes, black like night, dead as if he had been licking the rotting flesh off a corpse six feet under. I never felt his touch when I felt sane, only when I was alone, staring at his house, those open doors. Those open, -closet- doors.

He looked like some man who would take a child off the street and take her for a joyride, then brutally rape and murder her- No, it was worse. He looked like some man who would shoot a child for the enjoyment and the murderous high he craved- No, it was still worse. He looked like a man who would -eat- a child, not to be murderous, not for the high, because something that is not living, something that is not real, yet surreally evil, does not feel. Those deep pits inside him where the internal organs should be, where his blood would run and his heart would beat, lay nothing but a black, burning pit of fire. A fire that was hungry.

He would lunge for my mouth, for my face, for my throat; he would lunge. He was the leftovers from the sweet taste of desert that night, that stayed in the back of the fridge to decompose until soon, that desert you once enjoyed a bite of, was nothing more than a lump collecting mold and other bacteria. He wasn't my dad, he didn't resemble my dad in the slightest bit. He was this evil, dark thing that survived off fear, regret, bad memories. He talked to me frequently, mocking me, humiliating me, twisting my emotions and braiding them into apathy.

He would lure me to the closet, his lair in which he sits, because there, I couldn't win.

“Don't eat me.”

“Elli, what did you say?” It was Ms. Andreq, distracting me from the thoughts, the memories, the recollection that was so vivid. Ironically as Ms. Andreq had distracted me, I had distracted her, and apparently a good portion of the class as well, who also, were staring in my direction. The teacher waved a limp hand, as if to brush the thought aside, but her eyes weren't the same. They floated awkwardly around the room, avoiding contact with my fellow classmate's, and then she glinted back to me again. As if what I had said, had certainly concerned her.

Later on that voluptuous woman with the golden curls pulled me aside in the halls, calling me on the words I had so dumbly spoken in the midst of a lesson. I watched her lips attempt to form the words of sternness, and for a second I thought she was going to lecture me on interrupting, but the sides of her mouth quickly went down, the edges south of where they should be. “What did you say in there?” she asked me, questioning my motives.

“I didn't,” I denied. I grabbed a piece of my dark red hair and jerked it back roughly behind my ear; the self inflicted pain no one could see.

“I heard you say- You didn't want me to eat you.” Shit. She made it sound casual, as if the words she spoke of cannibalism were completely normal. She didn't know about the closet, she didn't know about him, she wouldn't. I shouldn't have slipped, I shouldn't have said it.

“I didn't say that, I think you're hallucinating,” I said, trying to pull off a grin equipped with a fake laugh, as it turned out, I resembled some tortured hyena. “Ha, see you later Ms. A.” I walked away, the heavy text books along with me, I was in the clearing. The highway and the back road were now two separate places. I knew to keep my mouth shut. No one would believe me if I told them, they would think I was crazy.

They would think:

“Oh that poor girl, oh her mother drinks and her brother's retarded, oh her dad burned her fucking house down, oh that poor girl has had such a rough life, oh that girl dyed her hair that color because she wants to rebel from society, oh that girl has had such an awful life, she must be looking for attention. Oh, that girl, she sure does know how to fucking make up stories.”

If they only knew, how bad I was at making stories, shit, I couldn't even write my name on my own English paper.