You know what they say... you can run, but you can't hide.


Still

I can almost taste it, his raw, whiskey-scented breath on my face and against my neck, just like old times. I just have to close my eyes and I'm there again, body and soul, in his arms, beneath the heaving weight of him. I can hear the swallows outside my window, the soft flapping sound of their wings as they ascend and descend. Rise and fall, like his chest when he draws a mouthful of smoke from the tar-infested butt of his cigarette.

Cut to a sharp, cold noise of irons clapping together, of chains. With my eyes still shut, that noise, it just isn't there at all. Voices far from me and yet painfully near are spitting words I don't recognize, words that I might've known if I wasn't a billion miles away.

Cut to the outline of his silhouette right next to me in my bed, the warmth coming off his body in waves. And the feeling of helplessness, the choking sense of drowning as he kisses me, his tongue so far down my throat I can just barely keep from vomiting, thinking I'm going to die, to suffocate. The ropes around my wrists that cut into my skin, my arms bent backwards the way that might've made a lesser person cry-- a lesser fighter, someone not as used to pain as I am.

And then: someone trying to get my attention, tugging at my arm. Someone bending over my shoulder from behind me, saying something with his mouth right next to my ear. Dank air coming from his mouth, the smell of decay that he's tried to conceal with breath mints, to no avail. Who? I don''t know. But this unknown man and his hand on my shoulder, he flashes me back to another time, someone else''s story, someone else''s trauma.

Oh, they're so quick to judge, aren't they, so quick to label you insane. They'll go "let's talk about your parents" with their sterile white rooms and impeccably clean hands. Hands that idly tap a rhythm against their walnut desks while they nod, act interested and speak of TRAUMAS, and I feel like I want to throw up and nod back at them and say, yeah, you wanna talk trauma? I''ll fucking show you trauma.

Cut to my hand seeming so small when held in place by his fist, my lips chafed from the three day stubble on his prominently squared jaw. The metallic taste in my mouth when I've licked my lips dry.

And the chains around my wrists, they're hurting me for no apparent reason. I still keep my eyes shut. I'm so stubborn, and not in the cute kind of way exercised to get attention, but in the way that makes people go crazy because I won't obey. I won't obey. I won't obey.

Cut to me slashing my father's throat with the rusty blade of a Swiss army knife gifted to me on my tenth birthday. Two weeks earlier, I accidentally left it out in the rain, and the pretty pretty silver turned a disappointing blush of orange. Now it's red red red everywhere and the rust isn't even remotely visible anymore. I marvel at the sounds my father makes, as he desperately gasps for air, trying to draw breath. If it wasn't so terrible cliched, I might've compared him to a fish on dry land. Anyway, the blood is gushing out of my father's throat, and it colors everything neatly, you know, where the bed is kind of like a landscape and the little white that's left is the snow, and everything else is tinted by a ferocious and unmerciful evening sun. Like something fresh out of Shakespeare, I bend over him and before I know what's going on, I'm kissing him, violently, and I'm the vicious, evil predator all of a sudden.

And then it's all just still. Not a movement. Just me and my knife, and I know somewhere beneath the fleshy cage of his body, my father's heart has stopped beating.

Lights. A scene of passion and hatred. The best and the worst in the human being. To kill or be killed - a play written by Me, based on a true story. For real this time.

And then, it's intermission, and they're asking me why, why did I do it, why did I kill my father, and I can barely keep from laughing.




Short story by Liv Sol Möller
Read 1170 times
Written on 2006-09-26 at 09:54

Tags Incest  Murder  Memories 

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Rob Graber
Powerful and disturbing, to say the least...
2006-09-26