His Mother's Son

     He hated her. He hated her with all of the being that she had created in her womb. Was his birth really the last time he had been close to her? He would like to have thought so, but knew that is was the betrayal of his love and trust that he once gave her so freely that made his animosity burn bright within him; the furnace being fed by the constant parade of the vivid memories that still pervaded his sleeping hours and lurked on the edge of those spent awake.

     He sat down at his black clap-board desk and for a moment tried to gather the nerve that it would take to see his plan through. The entirty of it was to much for him to bear, and with a slight shift of his weight, he prepared to stand up and walk away from the entire scheme. 

     His sweaty palms slid across the ink blotter and came to a stop at the edge. If he was ever going to do this, it had to be now. The situation was ripe, and although his nerve faltered, it was the most he had been able to muster up to this point. Perhaps, if he just wrote the letter, then the entire situation would not seem so overwhelming. If, after he wrote the letter, he decided against it, he could file it away as a failed writing exercise that would make an interesting read years from now.

     His qualms quelled, he reached for a single sheet of creamy, lineless paper. This type of paper was not the kind one causally wrote upon, but was more suitable for resumes to be emblazoned upon it's front. He almost put the paper back and reached for the thin notebook paper that showed it's cheapness by revealing the lines on the opposite side of the page were not quite aligned. He hated the way the nib never really bit into that paper, instead merely scratching over the surface, never really changing it, merely only being a carrier of the ink on its surface. No, the weighty paper would be the repository for the words he would form tonight. The creamy surface would bend to his nib's will and drink in the ink, forever altering its nature. It would no longer be ink and paper, but would become his work of art. With a gusty exhale, he began.

Mother -

 

"It is with heavy heart that I set pen to paper. "

     He liked that start, it tapped into his previous ponderance on the paper's weighty quality befitting the weighty message he was about to carve into it, and it made him feel poetic. He felt if he started off a touch wistful that it would be more believable.

"I don't know how to tell you the things that I feel inside. It is like a swirling eddy of emotions that I thought dead and gone. Buried, their death ensured by the passage of time. Yet they are resurrected; alive and even more ghoulish than they previously were. "

     His nib hovered above the page. Oh, how true were the words on the page. They were more than melodramatic prose aimed to sting right to the center of her heart. They were the truth. Did she deserve the truth? To know how she had hurt him? He assumed that she knew, how could she not? How could a mother do that to her own child, or more correctly children, and not know the damage she had done?

     When he had seen her three months ago, it had been the first time in over eleven years. Her time in prison had reduced her to her most basic parts. It had stolen all the padding her flesh provided so that her face was hollowed to the point that her skull's shape was visible even at a distance. The absence of sunlight had sallowed her skin and dulled her hair so that it hung stringily around her face. Once strong limbs now reminded him of venison jerky encased in a loose sheaths.

     When he had agreed to finally meet with her, he expected many things, but what he did not expect was that horrible smile. Contracting her facial muscles pulled her mouth up into a pathetic pantomime of a human. It made him hate her even more for being so pitiful that he could not even feel justified in his utter loathing of her.

     How different she had looked the last time he saw from the witness box. Her eyes were so full of fire and cheeks ruddy with the blood that pulsed through her, that he could not look at her while he droned through the entire story. He did not even allow a flicker of emotion to touch his words when he told the tomb quite room how he held that tiny body until all warmth had leached out of it. The words deadpanned into the room, falling flatly on the linoleum, so heavy they did not even reverberate off the warm oak walls.

     Angry that she was causing the tears to form in his eyes, he pushed the thought aside and tried to focus on the task. He continued to write.

"These feelings invade my day and steal my sleep. Behind my eyes I see the scenes replay in vivid color. I can still feel the heat and taste the iron in the air from the hot sticky blood all around me. Ruby red and so very hot. I had never seen anything so red, and never have since."

     A tear splashed from the end of his nose on to the paper. It touched the ink and began to spread slightly, blurring the word "red". Staring down at it, it began to almost look like the pool of blood the word was to represent. The anger swelled in his chest. How dare the tear, the tear that she caused, mar his perfect specimen, the testament to his genius? He flexed his hand to crumple the page and sweep it from this view, but stopped. Wasn't this letter supposed to convince her that he was so racked with guilt, so overwhelmed by grief that he had no other choice but to take his own life? He enjoyed thinking about how he would be laying in bed, newly christened into his new life, with his new name and all the while she thought of him as a dead, putrid carcass, swept away by the rushing river. Jumping off a bridge seemed so cliche, but he could think of no other way to leave no body behind.
     Unclenching his fist, he told himself how the tear added a touch of authenticity to his creation. Perhaps she would read the note and her eye would return to the tiny mar and it would be the very stab to the heart that pushed her into overwhelming regret at losing a second son. Yes, he would let the tiny puddle stay, but wiped his nose with the back of his hand to make sure not to let her enjoy the feeling of having completely destroyed him. Carefully he chose his next words.

"It is like, it is like living here and living there at the same time. I don't know how to escape. My previous crutch seems to have whittled to a twig to small to support my weight. I am burdened beneath the crushing force. I can see no way out of it. I open my mouth to scream, but fear no sound comes out for who will hearing me? "

     He liked that last passage and was impressed at how he had come up with something to aprope. He pondered how it would sound to other's ears. Would they hear the desperation? Would they be able to feel how much he was hurting in his words? Would they be able to know how much he just had needed someone to reach out and to check on him? No one, not a single friend who said they understood, or co-worker who knew of his mother's upcoming release had asked how he was holding up. With no family left, he thought of them as his family. He needed them, he needed them to act as proxy. But how could he expect those who had rosy Christmas card families, who's lives were filled with birthday cakes and baby pictures really understand what it was like to feel the abject terror of being alone? How could expect any of them to understand the empty hole that was his interior?

"Who can see me pass through the day as a walking corpse and not tell the light in my eyes is gone? How can I tell them that I am almost gone? That the essence of me is slowly shrinking away, being claimed by wave after wave of grief and remorse. How can I tell you these things and have you truly understand? Where is me? Where have I gone?"

     He had not meant to address anyone other than his mother with his words, but after thinking upon his so called friends and the lonely feeling they had left with him to be his constant companion, he could not help himself. Good, perhaps his mother would not be the only one who felt guilt for how he had been treated. Maybe now they would understand how they had abandoned him, left him in the cold, alone and isolated. His lip quivered, and before he would let is get further, he refocused on his faux suicide note.

"How can I get back what I once had? For the span of a few short years, I was happy, I was full, I was free. Where am I now? This degradation into a former self seems almost unthinkable. Work and progress that I have made, the infrastructure I have made in my own mind seems to have been washed out with one fantastic flood. Gone, with no trace of what it was. "

     Suddenly he hated the idea that they would all get off so free and clear after his supposed death. After he "jumped off a bridge", they would barely notice his absence. With no messy scene to clean up, with no bloated and blue corpse to blemish their lives, they would only notice that no one was filling the batch orders or that they were one person short at poker night. No one would really miss him if he just slunk into the night like some kind of coward.

     He suddenly thought of his mother again. If he really wanted to have hurt, he would set it up so that his death was an exact replica of his brother's. He would slice one side of this throat so the boiling fountain of crimson painted the walls of his small apartment, covering everything, nothing would escape. It would either be covered by the large sprays or coated with the infinitesimal mist or be slowly covered by the lava pool that grew larger and larger as his body grew cold. Every detail of that recurring nightmare, every element of that horrible day played back in his mind as he imagined how he really wanted to show his mother his hate. Only this time he would not be the one clutching the body, he would be the body, just like he should have been that first time. The nib found the paper.

"I need something, I need help, I need a rope, who will come to me? Who will help me? Who will rescue me? Dark, alone, desolate, how much further can I go by myself? How much further can I endure? Alone. I am so alone."

     A sob escaped his lips. His shoulders wracked forward as his raw emotion escaped from its confinement and expressed itself through his entire body. He finally let himself feel what he had been trying to deny since he saw that horribly pathetic smile; he was a quivering, slobbering mess. The words the prosecutor had made him repeat over and over again, his mantra for when he was scared, "It was not my fault, I was too small to stop her", echoed through his head again and again, and every time he said them, he believed them less.

     It was his fault. It was. He knew how angry she was. He knew that he was older and should have protected him. He was his brother, he was his responsibility. He should have known that that time was different. The taste of the iron was in his mouth again.

"I just want to close my eyes and sleep. Sleep forever, to drift in a world where no rules, no gravity, no reality to weigh me down. Free. I wish to be free."

     As soon as he wrote the words, he knew it was true. It had been in the back of his mind the entire time he had been contemplating his escape from his own life. He now realized that his plan was nothing more than a way to fantasize about suicide without actual having to face the demon. It had only been his mother's incarceration that had ebbed back the pain inside. A pain that while denied and ignored was always there. The pain that stared back at him through the image of his brother's glossed, inert eyes. Frozen open in terror after death, frozen forever in his mind.

     It was not the artful arterial spray he ensured streaked across the large white wall of the office, or dark stained handle of the kitchen knife he had used or the tacky pool that began to form around his face as he lay on the cool, slated floor; it was those eyes. Those eyes that had burned into his soul with accusation for so long, now relaxed and finally closed.