Context
These two excerpts are part of a larger collection of short stories and auto-fiction essays, all dealing with the tumultuous history of a single family throughout a thirty-year period. The first excerpt is an auto-fiction essay meant to preface the collection, and it shares a subtle narrative link with the following short story that introduces us to the family in focus.
Content Warning: family violence.
Summer, 2017
The back bedroom. That's the name I had for it. A corner room in the back of the house, hidden at the end of a dark hallway. It was closed behind a mutilated door; its front panel of plywood violently ripped away, exposing the frame and leaving the torn edges of a gaping pit behind. The doorknob had been removed, and its empty space was shoved through with a large, crumpled wad of toilet paper to keep the room's musty air from escaping out. A long, thick, yellow sock was squeezed shut in between the door's edge and the wall-frame, creating a tight seal that kept the house's powdery gusts from easing it open.
Many times I saw that door. Many times I stood in front of it. Every time, I always remembered it. That used to be my bedroom, several years ago. Back then, it was a blessing. I kept it so clean, so tidy, I loved it! It was a playground, a gaming room, a little theater. I had my own bed, my own desk, my own closet, my own T.V. I had everything! My first taste of my own space, my own, my own room. Its only imperfection was that door - it had already long been mutilated, and I never once questioned why or how. To me, it had always been that way, and it would always be that way.
I forget how long it was before my grandpa kicked my family and I out of that house. I forget even the day we were forced to leave. But I never forgot that room – a taste of independence I wouldn't have again for years. Time passed, and I grew into a different person.
After seven years, my grandpa invited my dad and I - just us - back to live with him in that house once again. That's how, on that summer day in 2017, I once again stood in front of that mutilated door. Its door panel was still ripped like cardboard, but I didn't recognize the sock or the toilet paper - these were new additions, meant to conceal and seal off the room inside. But they wouldn't conceal it from me.
When I moved close to the door, I realized I didn't even recognize the air that surrounded it. It used to be clean; now it was heavy, like embalmed wood. I laid my hands on the wood and pushed, but it resisted me - there was something behind it, some mound on the other side, pushing back. So I shoved, and a thin gap opened. The sock shut between the door fell limp onto the ground. The gap widened, and out poured loose a wave of air, thick with dust and the smell of old fabric. The yellow light from dirty, smeared windows fell upon my eye, and I saw what seven years had done to my old bedroom. It was trashed. Filled with garbage and old furniture, every inch of its floor was covered in heaps sometimes five feet tall. I pushed the door harder, shoving against all the filth behind it until finally the gap was wide enough for me to slip through. Leaping inside the room, the mound of trash fell back on the door and slammed it shut behind me. With uneven footing I stood, and this is what I saw.
Torn plastic bags full of rotten, ripped clothes, spilling out like disembowelments. Snapped wood planks, like jagged spears, sticking this way and that. Old furniture, including a ripped leather office chair with its wheels coated in snagged balls of hair. A massive old mattress, formerly blue, yet stained with dried brown liquids that hardened it like paper mache. There were papers, and food containers filled with wet, black decompositions. Sticky soda bottles still stained with the stuck residues of corn syrup. Pringles cans filled with cellophane and napkins. Old faded paintings, and the shattered glass from broken picture frames. The beige floor panels - what few of them still visibly reached out from under the wreck - were speckled with styrofoam crumbles and dots of mouse shit.
I stood there, and I thought. 'This is what he did to my room. Seven years, and this is what he did.' Somehow, it didn't surprise me. I can't even remember how that first impression affected me. But I do remember that it intrigued me, this wreck. I still saw several of my old memories, sticking out from the ruin like little diamonds in a pile of ash. My heavy box T.V. still sat in the corner, and a few of my videogame disks lay beside it. The broken Discovery telescope which disappointed me as a child now stuck oddly out of the closet. I was curious to see what other relics I could find, so I set to picking around. I recklessly dug through the refuse, treating the garbage as carelessly as my grandpa had done before, and I found many things, many memories and artifacts that I had forgotten I could remember.
Yet many of the memories I found did not belong to me at all - there were letters and postcards, written in illegible cursive on aged yellow paper, and there were photographs. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Print after print of stained sepia, each one depicting people I had never met before. Most of them predated me by years, often several decades. Some of them were greyscale polaroids of children now surely either dead or aged beyond recognition. A few of them had dates - '1961', '1962', ‘1959'.
I became fascinated by them, even more so than by my own memories that were so clearly outnumbered by this wreckage of other, past lives. I ripped out a leather suitcase from beneath the old mattress, and into it I hoarded every picture, letter, and postcard that I found. While I could do what I wanted with my own, I had no permission to discard and destroy the memories of others. They had to be recovered and kept safe. So I went about my work with a slow resolve, tossing furniture and trash heaps this way and that.
While I labored, I felt something - the only feeling I can now recall with clarity. It was a strange breed of sadness, blended with nostalgia and firmed with passive resolution. To me, even the private relics and memories of my past had been drowned out in an avalanche of the ruined lives and broken dreams of others. My own personal bedroom, made into an unmarked graveyard of foreign faces, and here I was to spend my time and my youth exhuming the remains that others had left behind? Yeah, it made me sad. But it did not keep me from my work, for I thought at that time if I ever was to have even a life that belonged purely to me, it would have to be dug free from the past that sat crushing atop it. And so, I worked.
Spring, 1989
I listened to their stories, and I could see it. Twenty-eight years prior, in that same house.
We're in the living room. There's a radio scanner sitting atop a dark, wooden in-table. From the dusty speaker behind its metal grille rasps outward the illegible babble of various men, their reports and statements lost in the inattentive air. Beside it is a woman sitting in a large, cushioned rocking chair. She has light brown hair, and is drinking iced diet Pepsi out of a heavy glass cap. She sways gently back and forth without the slightest squeak from the rockers. She stares at a box T.V. sitting in front of her. It is set atop a sturdy shelf with reflective glass cabinet doors, and it is playing Days of Our Lives. Against the wall is a brown cushioned couch, its fabric decorated with beige floral patterns. Its armrests terminate in polished wooden spheres, like flanking orbs curling out to embrace the air between them. The room is lit with the warm, orange light of a cream ceramic lamp, filtering out from under its cotton lampshade in a soft, pleasant radiance, like a hearth fire.
Two boys sit on the couch's opposite ends. They're young, wearing bright pajamas and matching bowl-cut hair, thick and brown. A little girl, even younger, sits cross-legged on the floor in front of them. They're all fidgeting, maybe playing with toys, but they don't speak to each other. In fact, they don't even share glances. They've lost themselves in the idleness of the scanner dispatches in the air above. Through the foggy static and chatter, they passively wait for the message. It's a signal they've all been well conditioned to recognize. The words, and especially the voice that speaks them, stick out from the static fog like the signal fire of a lighthouse in the dark. Even their mother, whose attentions seem to be consumed by the soap opera on T.V, never fails to miss it.
"We're home, Bucky!" Spoken by a scratchy, nasally voice with just a heft of bass.
"We're home, Bucky!" A coded sentence from their father, spoken into his dispatch radio from the conductor's cab of his driving rail-car.
It was his last signoff on the dispatch before leaving his train at the depot in town. Using the radio for personal matters was expressly forbidden by the company he worked for, yet their father was ever crafty. So he made that short, inconspicuous little message, using the name Bucky' that had no real value to him. It was meant purely to tell his wife and three eager children, who in his mind were gathered eagerly around the radio scanner back home, that after his several days spent away in hard labor, he was finally coming back.
Indeed, they have spent many nights like this, waiting up for him. The nine o'clock bedtime for the kids shunned for just an extra hour, or maybe two, just to make sure they got a chance to see him that night. Every time they heard that voice through the radio, the kids would abandon whatever it was they were doing and jump up with eyes wide in excitement. Their mother would brightly look back at her kids, give a gentle smile and say, "There he is!" Sure enough, about 40 minutes later, there he would be. Headlights would flash through the woven velvet curtains drawn behind the wide, clear living room windows. The soft rumble of a sports car in the driveway would cease, and then rough hands would twist the polished brass handles of the front doors that had been left unlocked just for him.
He would step into the living room, eyes tired from days of hard work. The smell of his crisp leather jacket, tinted with hints of engine oil and grease, would partner with the cool night air behind him to announce his return throughout the whole house. He himself was a short, stubby man with a thick mustache and thin smile. Dark brown eyes that didn't know much but could still feel with passion. The kids would run to him and embrace him right there, in front of the doorway. His mustache rumpled in a slight smile, he would reach down and out from his pockets he would pull toys, action figures, candy, or any other little gift he had picked up in the various cities and towns his work had brought him to. He would always pick those gifts with the thought of what would make his children's smiles shine brighter, and this they would always achieve. Once the toys were all given away, his wife would rise from that cushioned chair and give him a soft kiss on the cheek. She would look him in the eyes and say, with a playful smile, "Well, welcome home."
This has been the story for many nights now, over many years. But tonight, it will be different. This time, their father has been away for nearly a week. The boys sit on the couch, at opposite ends. Their sister sits on the floor in front of them, with a large doll and a shoebox stuffed with rags. Their mother is in her cushioned rocking chair. Days of Our Lives is on the T.V. again, but this time it's a rerun; accordingly, she keeps her face buried in a magazine. The police scanner beside her on that dark in-table is warbling off its typical mess of faceless voices. They are all silent, caught idle in the artificial noise above them. It's a night like all the others.
Back on the couch, Brian, the younger of the boys, looks up at the clock hanging high on the wall beside him. It is 8:55 P.M. He has no clue when exactly his father's message will come through the radio. Sometimes, it's hours early, other times it's hours late. He looks back down again, and begins to rap his knuckles upon his right knee in a fit of restless boredom. First, he varies the rhythms, but soon his steady beats give way to irregular thumps. His heart is anxious. He wonders what toys he will receive tonight - will it be an action figure, or a metal car? The thoughts make his eyes grow wide.
He looks at his sister. She has dressed her doll in tiny pajamas, and soon she will tuck it in to sleep in that shoebox of folded clean rags, saying loudly her 'goodnights' and 'sleep wells'. Brian then looks aside to his brother on the couch. Jason is not like his siblings; he is still. His hands do not twitch, and his dark eyes are fixed upon the gap between the window curtains. They dart ever so slightly, never once breaking away from their empty gaze.
Brian's restlessness grows. He thinks to himself 'How much longer will it be?' He looks back up again at the clock, and his shoulders slump when he sees that it is now only 8:59. He continues to rap on his knee until suddenly his brother gives a large sigh and stands up. He walks over to the back corner of the living room. There stands a large black cabinet, and from it he grabs a plastic container of Lincoln Logs and loudly spills them across the floor. Ashlea gives a brief, curious glance before returning to her doll's bedtime ritual. Their mother says nothing.
Jason begins to build a wooden fort, and Brian notices that he doesn't once look at him. He stares for a moment. Then he gets up and joins his brother on the floor; he begins to build a sturdy log cabin.
Brian looks at his brother and asks, "What are you building?"
Jason does not turn his head. "A fort."
Brian continues to stare. “Maybe I should get my toy soldiers, and we can have a battle!”
Jason continues to look down at his fort. "I don't wanna battle."
Brian, rejected, slowly looks back to his little cabin, saying nothing. As time goes by, he takes apart and rebuilds his cabin. Each iteration is larger and larger, with sturdy rooms and wide roofs. But still, he cannot help himself from looking at his brother beside him. He notices that while his own cabin is sound and firm, Jason's fort has become wild. Its pieces do not fit together; they are precariously balanced in ways they weren't meant to be, and are placed illogically. Brian resists the temptation to knock it over. Instead, he says to his brother, "That's a cool fort". Jason finally looks up at his brother and says, “Yeah, I like it.”
Time passes. Brian has built, rebuilt, and torn down his cabin several times when his mother looks up from her magazine and notices the clock. It is 10:33. Still no word from her husband has come across the scanner. She softly sighs and sets down the magazine. Rising from her chair, she stands in the center of the room and says in a voice low with slight disappointment,
"Alright everyone, it's time to go to bed." Ashlea, having put her doll to bed herself several times at this point, clumsily gets up and goes away to brush her teeth. Brian and Jason, however, do not move; rather they stare at her, and Jason whines in a high voice, "Can't we stay up for a little bit longer?"
Their mother walks toward them. "No, you guys got school in the morning, you've gotta go to bed."
"But I wanna see dad!" Jason's face droops.
"Guys, you'll get to see him tomorrow. Now come on, get all that stuff put away and go brush your teeth." She lays her hands on her hips and stares them down, and the boys know there's no use arguing further. Brian's disappointment is great, but he says nothing. He carefully disassembles his cabin and puts all the pieces away quietly. Jason, however, recklessly and loudly throws down his fort. He quickly throws his pieces in the plastic box and leaves, and by the time Brian has put the box away Jason is already in the bathroom reaching for his toothbrush.
When Brian finally makes it to the back bedroom, the light is off and Jason is already in the top bunk, swallowed beneath his blankets and hidden from view. Brian, leaving the bedroom door open, quietly gets into the bottom bunk and wraps himself up in a bright blue blanket. He hears the soft murmuring of his mother outside in the hallway as she wishes their sister goodnight. A door softly clicks shut, and a second later their mother stands in the open doorway of his room. She walks up to the bunk bed, reaches up to his brother and says in a quiet, sweet voice, "I love you Jason, goodnight." She then reaches down to Brian, and, saying the same thing, gives him a silent kiss on the forehead. Darkness falls behind her as she closes the door and leaves, and Brian, without a thought or care in the world, quickly falls asleep.
It is to a loud slamming that Brian jolts awake. Eyes suddenly throw wide in response to a deep, violent crash reverberating throughout the walls, it is so sudden that at first he isn't sure if it really even happened; perhaps it is just a strange figment of the dreams he has left behind. The voice of his brother, quiet and cautiously whispering out from the top bunk, is what confirms to Brian the noise was real.
"Did you hear that?" Jason asks.
"Yeah I did." Brian is quiet, taking a cue from his brother that for some reason, it is best for them to remain unnoticed. The two of them can now hear the rumbling of footsteps stumbling across the living room floor. A soft thud follows, and then the faint racket from the T.V. begins to creep through the door. "It must be dad!" Jason says in sluggish excitement, and he begins to climb down the bed posts to the door, his skinny frame above visible to Brian like a shadowy spider in the dark. Brian likewise sweeps aside his blanket and steps onto the floor, but before Jason can open the door they both hear a soft voice in the living room. It's their mother, who was likewise startled awake by the harsh slamming.
"Hey, you're back late.” Her voice is soft and slow with tiredness, but her high pitch indicates a faint concern. Jason, standing in front of the door, senses this. He does not open. Brian comes up and stands next to him with his ear pressed against the wood, keen to follow his brother's example. They hear no response from their father; only the sound of late night commercials instead.
"Hey, are you alright? You're back late, you okay?" Her pitch raises. The boys can tell she is concerned.
"Why'd you lock the door?" It's the voice of their father. They'd recognize it anywhere, that nasally scratch with a heft of bass. But it's different now, sluggish and seeming to be spoken with great labor. And it's loud. Louder than it should be.
"Well I had to go to bed honey, it was getting late. I can't stay up forever, you know this."
"Don't fucking lock the door on me again." His voice sinks so low it's almost a growl.
The boys freeze when they hear this. Brian's heart begins to pound. Jason's hand slides onto the door knob, but he doesn't twist it.
It's a few moments before they hear their mother speak again. When she does, the concern is drowned with a deeper, yet more fragile and unsure anger. "You're drunk, aren't you?"
"No, I'm not drunk."
"Yeah you are, I can smell it. You know it's past two in the morning? You're gonna wake the kids up, come on, turn that thing off and let's go to bed."
"Don't fucking tell me what to do." His voice is loud. Brian begins to shake.
Their mother says nothing, yet they hear no footsteps. In low, slurred words their father begins to ramble. "You're always fucking telling me what to do... This is my house, mine, I bought it. That's my money you spend. I can do whatever I want in my own house..."
"Larry, what the hell has gotten into you?" Their mother's voice begins to shake. "This is our house! You're gonna wake the kids!"
"Hah!" His laugh is hateful and forced. "Yeah, I'm just your idiot... I can't do nothing right... You were always making fun of me, saying I can't spell, bitching at me all the time! Telling me how to spend my money, probably fucking around on me too... Shit, I'm just your idiot."
Every word he speaks is slow and labored. And spiteful. Brian and Jason, standing in the dark of their room, tremble by the door. Another silence falls in the living room, and Brian carefully whispers to his brother, "Why's dad angry?" But Jason, still clutching the door knob he has yet to turn, gives no reply. They then hear the rustling of fabric, and heavy footsteps start to thunder towards the kitchen.
Sensing an opportunity of some kind, Jason finally - and cautiously - eases the door open. The white light of the T.V. washes through the gap in the door. At the end of the hallway, the boys see the gray silhouette of their mother, her back turned to them, standing still at the edge of the living room. Jason creeps forward toward her, and Brian, wide eyed and trembling with fear, quietly follows him. They come upon their mother at her left, and Jason, in a high whisper, asks her, "Mom, what's wrong with dad?”
Their mother is startled by the voice of her son, and as she turns to look at him with a sharp gasp, the boys see that her eyes are filled with tears that have only barely been kept from breaking loose in torrents upon her cheeks. Quickly wiping her eyes and bending low to her sons, her motions rapid with fear, she takes her boys by their shoulders and says, in a faux pleasant voice undercut with quivering tension, "Oh, he's fine! We're just having a discussion, that's all! Now go on now, get back to bed, you have school in the morning, the both of you!"
A loud, violent slamming of the refrigerator door in the kitchen punches through the air with force. Brian and Jason jump at the impact, and as their mother turns her head towards the kitchen, a paralyzing shouts shakes the walls and roils the air around them.
"Where the fuck is supper at?! Huh, Carol?!" Heavy footfalls slam towards them on the floor like hateful drum beats, and in a moment the dark presence of their father returns to the living room. It is the first time the boys have seen his face in over a week. It is ugly, his thick cheeks bright red and his round jaw unshaved. A pungent, sour odor surrounds him. The shifting light of the T.V. drowns half of his body in utter darkness, and the one dark eye the boys can see out of shadows stares them down with hate. Jason recoils behind his mother, while Brian nearly begins to scream.
Seeing this, their mother finally snaps. Tears pouring down her face, she lets loose a shrill scream, grating and full of desperate hate. "You're scaring the boys you piece of shit!! Now stop acting like a fucking idiot!!" Larry does not heed this.
"What the hell are the boys doing up, huh?! What are you telling them, huh?!" His voice, though not as piercing, is loud and harsh enough to make ears bleed. "Why are they up?!"
"Because you fucking woke them up you dumb son of a bitch!"
Crying begins to seep out from Ashlea's bedroom. Larry, disregarding this, threatens to move towards his sons. "Get them little shits back to bed before I whoop their asses! Get them the fuck out of here!"
Carol quickly and aggressively grabs both of her boys by the wrist and drags them back into their room. Standing in their doorway, she looks down and speaks, no longer caring to hide the concern and sadness. "Boys, just go back to bed okay? Just keep this door closed and don't come out, just go back to bed alright? It's gonna be okay, just go back to bed."
She swiftly closes the door. Brian and Jason, terrified, stand there in the dark. Brian has begun to cry. However, the continued rumbling of Larry's voice keeps them standing there by the door. Though they hate to hear it, they again press their ears back towards the wood.
"Fuckin' filling their heads full of lies probably... Gonna turn my own kids against me, you manipulative bitch... can't even make supper now? I come home and this is the shit I get...' His rambling is almost absent-minded now, quiet yet clear enough to be heard still. They hear mother coming out of Ashlea's room, and suddenly she lets out a hateful cry, "Oh go fuck yourself you stupid piece of shit!!"
The wind beats as she hastily walks back to her own bedroom. She slams the door shut, and the boys hear her lock it behind her. Larry does not avenge this latest outburst. Instead, after a brief moment, he begins to quietly ramble again. "Yeah, I'm the piece of shit, huh... hah, yeah fuck you. Should've never married your lying, cheating ass..... Ugly bitch, should've never married you... I'm just a piece of shit, huh... fuck you.”
The boys have finally had enough, and they pull away from the door. Brian is wiping the tears from his face, and Jason begins to feebly climb back up the bed posts to his bunk. Seeing his dark frame, Brian weakly asks, “Jason, what's wrong with dad?"
"I don't know, I... Just go to bed." With that, he wraps himself up in his blanket and disappears from view. Brian stands there motionless for a moment, continuing to dry his face, before getting back into bed himself. Wrapped up in his blue blanket, he lies there awake for what seems an eternity. The drunken rumblings of his father continue to invade the room like a brown smoke, but they are faint and he cannot understand what he is saying. Each illegible groan, passing over him like a fog, stokes the fear in his heart. It is only when he has finally learned to ignore that fear that he falls into a fragile, anxious sleep.
About the Author
The thought of being a writer has always fascinated me, but I admit I never really considered myself one until fairly recently. My time at the University has taken a latent passion of mine and helped to mold it into an actual craft, and while I still hesitate to say it is my primary style of self-expression, it has become a favored pastime of mine. This specific piece is my attempt to bring understanding to the troubled history of my family. I have always believed that if I could produce something beautiful, or at least impactful, from the long past traumas that defined my life, then perhaps I could say that those thirty years of trouble at least produced something good. To that end, this story deals with the progression of time, non-linear memory, and generational trauma, and how I have tried to understand the family legacy I was born into. These two pieces are at the very beginning of a larger collection of related short stories, and they serve to introduce the reader both to myself and to the past generation of my family.
