A Story with No Name

This is a story with no name-

About a boy with no name-

Though he is lost now,

Dead-

Forgotten-

They called him Luke.

"Heaven. What is heaven, Mommy? What does it look like?"

Andromeda didn't answer; too concerned with the amber liquid she swilled around the bottom of a green-tinged bottle. The taste was hot and peppery in her mouth, burning her rosebud lips, tingling on a tongue that lapped up the last droplets feverishly, hungrily. The words were a mere faraway buzz to her, small, soft, and childlike; just an annoying tickle that crept into her heedless ears and distorted a mind already hazed with potent drink.

The woman disliked the disturbance, however petty, however ordinary it had become to her pitiful existence: she was always ignoring the quiet, little boy whisper that pestered her drinking sessions.

Andromeda raised the glass slowly to her lips—as she always did—and took moderate, prolonged sips—(her fifth glass of the hour)—savoring the feel of strong alcohol as it swished between her teeth. She thought there was something special about this sip, the way it made the room blur pleasantly about the edges and muddled her thoughts contentedly. It did well to stifle the disease of depression that still ravaged her heart and soul.

Andromeda liked the effects of alcohol—the lingering warmth, the surreal lightness, the vagueness of perception—almost as much as she liked the pounding hangovers that followed, throbbing enough to overcome the customary aches and bruises of a dysfunctional household.

But the liquid slid down her throat and suddenly the bottle was empty. She felt her stomach clench, a terrible prickling sensation skidding down her spine. More, more—but it was gone.

Her fingers slackened on the drink, her eyes almost straying to the boy who sat cross-legged before her, though the impulse was squelched about as quickly as it had risen within her. Andromeda would not look.

She threw back her head roughly, jagged, uneven locks of auburn hair tumbling off her pale brow. She would not look at the boy. She would expunge any decaying dregs of motherly affection she still harbored and not look at this child.

He made her sick, this little boy, made her sick with his too thin, too beautiful face and too blonde hair that flopped uselessly into too blue, too fragile eyes. He raked talons into her back with his sad, broken expression and humbled, quivering tone. The very sight of him made her stomach knot, her skin go clammy; the repulsive taste of bile rise up in her throat, flood her mouth, twist her lips. There was nothing more upsetting than this odd, unexpected intrusion in her life.

A little boy. Such a curse—

What a blessing.

He was smothering her, after all, without meaning, without knowledge, with nothing but a silly memory that was not his own.

A memory. A memory full of white lace and pretty pink pearls, of sweetness and bitterness, of life and death. A memory he embodied. A memory all about him.

Andromeda rubbed her temples tiredly, his words slipping in despite her neglect. His inquires were a tentative stream of murmurs, crawling quietly into her ears like a demented lullaby. The impulse to embrace him was almost as strong as the impulse to smack him.

Would he even bleed, if she smacked him? Did children like him bleed—?

"Have you ever seen it, Mommy? Heaven? What's it like—"

He was her little boy and she loved him.

"Shut up!" Andromeda moaned, and she felt her hand fling the bottle in his direction. It landed with an ugly, tinkling shatter. "I don't—I don't even understand what you're saying! Heaven's for dead people! Are you dead—are you—are you—are you?"

Later tonight, when the moon has cast its silver shadow across dilapidated buildings and the shards of her glass bottle glitter sickly green in the dark, Andromeda will stagger to his bedroom and whisper through the crack in the door. She will tell him that heaven was a beautiful place, but a place difficult to reach, because it teetered on a mountain. High up in the clouds. A wonderful place for people who suffer. For people like him.

A place where there was no wicked chorus of her voice, her words.

"Are you dead—are you—are you—are you?"

Was he dead?

Andromeda heard a slight rustling, a muffled breath, and with an odd jolt realized that the child was crying, his little fist pressed against his mouth. Her throat tightened, listening to the stifled, hushed sobs, almost seeing the eyelids flutter over pale, pastel blue orbs in an attempt to blink back moisture. Something about it made her joints tense, her heart pump angrily in her chest. He was crying. Her little boy was crying though he pretended not to be.

With a most hurried, fleeting glimpse at his face, she saw that his resistance came to no avail; fat, cloudy tears were slipping from his eyes and dribbling over the gash across his nose.

The gash. Andromeda's lips fell into a subtle frown, a small pain touching a heart that had slowed to a sluggish, weary beat. The gash. The gash?

Her fingers curled over the coarse folds of her skirt. She bit her lip, struggling with her intoxicated thoughts and grappling with half-forgotten memories she kept locked in forbidden boxes.

For one truly frightening, icy moment, Andromeda could not recall anything at all, from the day the boy was born to the name they were supposed to call him. But in an instant it came flooding back to her—a painful, sickeningly vivid tumble of memory—and she remembered.

Lucas had knifed him last night. She could see it now, almost relive it: a wretched spiral of events that began with her frozen in the doorway, clutching at her skirts, watching a tall man with dark hair knock fists into her son until the glint of cold metal flashed. Then a scream, a splash of red blood.

Her husband. The knife. The blood.

The gash.

Oh.

It wasn't anything out of the ordinary, but it disturbed her nonetheless, despite her attempts to remain aloof and unaffected. Perhaps it was the sight of red blood, its dazzling hue, how bright and incredibly ugly it was.

Or perhaps it was because her baby was special, precious, and she couldn't stand the pain.

The scene had faded soon after, broke away, just as her vision had broke away, into a thousand shimmering black particles that blinded her and made her dizzy. She remembered the child falling, her husband leering, the shimmering particles netting around her in a solid sheet of perpetual darkness.

When Andromeda awoke, faint and dizzied further, the room had been empty, apart from her presence and the unearthly splatter of rose-colored liquid on the rug. She recalled fever, clamminess, a chill that made her pull sweat-damp clothes closer to a shivering frame. She had stumbled on weak legs to the boy's bedroom, slumping against his door, heaving long, labored breaths that stabbed her lungs.

"Love," Andromeda remembered calling, softly. "It's Mommy, love. Everything's okay. Everything's okay. Mommy won't let him hurt you anymore. Please come out. Mommy won't hurt you…"

So the door had creaked open and there was her boy standing over the threshold: a disturbed image of bloody blonde bangs and weak blue eyes and tattered clothes ripped from abuse. His mouth was brittle. His eyes were glassy. His little white hand rested on the doorknob, his face a taut display of deep-seeded vulnerability and very frail hope.

Andromeda wanted to hold him close at that moment. To gather him in her arms—be a true mother—and stroke hair streaked coppery with red, sing sweet lullabies, whisper gentle tidings. She wanted to wrap him up in deep slumber, like a blanket, safe, secure, and wipe away every tear that clung to his lashes.

Instead, the sight of him stirred an old bitterness within her, an ancient poison, and the demon sneered through her, screamed, and made her leave him sobbing in the doorway.

He was her little boy and she loved him.

Another door swung open now—the entrance to a distorted home—and Andromeda turned in time to see her husband stroll in, a handsome man with raven hair and dark eyes that made her want to die. She felt the little boy draw a quick breath and scamper closer to her side.

Andromeda pursed her lips. Stupid child.

She couldn't protect him.

Her husband, Lucas, swept hid cold, glittering gaze over the sad scene spread out before him—the ravaged wife clutching her empty hands together, the glass on the floor, the nervous child grasping at her coarse skirts—and smiled.

Those eyes glittered more as they fell upon the child that wasn't his.

"What's wrong, kid?" He chided in a slow, pleasant drawl. "The monster under your bed hasn't eaten you yet? Don't worry," He grinned like he was the monster under the bed. "He always hungry for children who aren't supposed to be alive; they taste the best."

The boy didn't respond, didn't even tremble, though he pressed himself closer to his mother's knees. The action, somehow, only possessed Andromeda with the vicious desire to bat him away. How annoying it was to have this fragile youth hover so near to her, grabbing at her skirts, begging silently for a shelter that would never come!

Andromeda had never protected him before. Why did he always cling to her?

She made the mistake of averting her eyes, and Lucas finally took notice to her.

"Hey, baby," he called out in his drawl. "What's got you so down? Another failed affair, huh? Man left you again? That's too bad," He trilled the words with an evident pleasure, then dropped his voice to a low whisper. "Guess no one's gonna save you after all."

Andromeda kept her gaze locked steadfast on the wall ahead of her, studying the fissures that riddled the dull plaster, the graying paint that peeled from decaying panels. She pretended she was that wall, barren, gray and crumbling. Crumbling the way a temple crumbles when its pillars are too weak, or when the stone is too stale to support.

She was a crumbling pillar.

There was nothing odd or disturbing about her husband's jibe, as it was something he reminded her often, with lofty superiority, rather than with the hurt normally felt by a husband betrayed. Lucas was not concerned with her lack of loyalty. In fact, he seemed to find the situation almost comical—for the man that Andromeda had, quite nearly, run off with had eventually abandoned her for his rich home far away, leaving her with the cruelty of an abusive husband and the baggage of a dysfunctional blonde child.

ADHD. Dyslexia. How could a child whose father was…special have so many inborn problems?

Lucas said these words to her not out of punishment, but because each time the statement was made her eyes became glassier, her soul more distance, and another piece of herself would die. He said it because it made it a little more difficult to breathe, a little harder to ignore the boy huddled at her feet.

Andromeda's stomach crawled with nausea, but the tapestry in her mind wove itself anyway, full of bright colors: a young elfish man with mischievous eyes and a playful grin that made her heart melt. He was lean and tall and could jog for many hours, longer than she thought possible, almost as if there were little white wings attached to the heels of his shoes.

Andromeda blinked and found herself staring at a different smile, a darker one, inches from her face and drenching her body in cold dread. She didn't want any pain now, any red; she didn't want the mottled black bruises and aching soreness and lingering stiffness that paralyzed a body if Lucas fell to his whims of anger.

She didn't want memories of a life that withered away when a man with winged shoes flew away.

Lucas normally fell to his whims of anger.

Her husband was speaking, dark words, poisonous words, but she couldn't hear them over the rush of memories that flooded her thoughts, the feel of a child's hands gripping at her skirts. She wished the boy would stop. She wished he would go away, as his father had gone away. She wished his shoes, tattered, frayed, and muddied, would sprout little white wings so he could fly away.

Shoes with wings…white wings…angel wings…

A cold hand clamped on her forearm, tightly, and she saw Lucas's tunnel-black eyes boring down into her, his lips peeled back far in a snarl. There was no amusement in his heavy drawl now, just a precarious edge of anger that made her heart freeze mid-beat.

"I don't want this. I don't want memories."

"Not answering, sweet?" He remarked in a growl, shaking her whole body with a twitch of his arm. She felt weak. "Not answering when I speak to you? Now, what sort of gratitude is that after I've been working all day? Maybe I should teach you to a lesson—"

He raised his hand, and her eyes became dull empty stones, like her heart.

"No!"

The voice that piped up was pathetic; a high, cracked cry emitted from lips that shut themselves quickly and buried into the skirts of a stone-eyed mother. Andromeda could feel the boy trembling as he pressed into her side, tiny hands clutching for support and guidance—encourage, perhaps—at the very least a shadow of sympathy.

She gave none. Her eyes were vacant as they looked past her husband's face, to a faded wall, seeing ghosts that were not really there: ghosts of men with elfish smiles, of shoes with fluttering wings, of pretty glass cups filled with red, red wine.

A palace on a mountain.

Such a pretty dream.

"What'd you just say, kid? Luke. Did you just say 'no?' You're a big boy now, so you can vouch for this—"

He called her a word that wasn't her name.

"D-don't…don't talk that way…about Mommy!" the child squeaked between frightened gasps. "She—she—she's a good Mommy! Don't be bad. Don't make Mommy cry again. You always make her sad and hurt. G-go—go away! Mommy doesn't like you."

Andromeda's hands were ice over her skirts, limp things that felt nothing even as she swept them across the top of the boy's sandy head. Though her gaze never left the wall, she felt the child jerk his head toward her excitedly. She rarely ever showed any form of appreciation; the faintest display of affection thrilled him.

Truthfully, she did not know what had spurred on the gesture. Something in that little voice, those words, made Andromeda's heart throb with a painful, choking sentiment. She couldn't describe it. A shimmering blackness was crowding in the corners of her eyes again, fogging her mind, like she was about to lose consciousness. Andromeda imagined herself slumping against the chair, toppling to the floor in a whoosh of frayed skirts. She would wake hours later with the boy bleeding next to her.

Her boy. Her boy.

No. What was happening to her? Why did he make her feel this way?

Her husband merely cocked his head, laughing.

"Do you know what pathetic means, kid? It's a word we use for little boys like you, who risk their necks for mothers who would just as easily throttle them in their sleep. Remember the story I told you about Mommy? You were just a mistake she made, something she wants to forget. One day while she's combing your hair, she's gonna throw a rope around your neck and pull. Hard."

Andromeda stared rigidly at the wall ahead of her. Ghosts.

"That's not true!" the child wailed desperately, though his voice shook like he had considered it. "That's not true, you're lying—you're lying—"

Andromeda could almost picture the fire flaring in Lucas' eyes, deep shadowy flame that licking at his dark irises, climbing high with a hunger that could only be sated by pain.

"You think I'm lying, Luke? Tsk. Tsk. Poor baby…"

Luke. Lucas. Luke. Lucas. What was the difference between those two names?

One quaked at his mother's knees while the other towered with a knife in his pocket.

Luke. Lucas. What was the difference?

"I don't like you," the child spoke lowly. "You're a bad man. Go away. Leave us alone."

The little voice dragged through the air with a certain gravity, a weight his former retorts had been bereft of; there was firmness in these words, a melancholy, an imperceptive fear but sound stoutness in what he said.

The child fixed Lucas with a stare as powerful as his weak, misty eyes could muster—a shambled boy in rags, his face sallow and bangs ragged, falling limply over the cut across his nose. He was as fragile as glass, with mere paper for skin, white and flimsy, and a little heart about the size of a hummingbird fluttering in his chest.

Lucas frowned at the condemnation, his patience worn. His hand slid to his pocket.

"Giving me an attitude," he affirmed coldly. "Let's repeat last night—shall we? I'll show you what happens to stupid little boys who obviously want to die—"

Andromeda's heart was suddenly pounding in her chest, so hard and fast it racked her whole body with its tremors. She thought the entire room must be thudding along with the contractions. It was an unpleasant sensation, a painful one, a panicked beating that filled her chest with a lingering ache. She did not want to look, but her eyes were drawn away from the ghosts on the wall, to the little boy by her skirts.

She looked up and saw windows.

Frail, pastel blue windows that stood for the child's eyes, still clinging to a decaying innocence, revealing what appeared to be a long stretch of untouched sky. They were like outlets to another life, another person.

Windows to a god.

Andromeda felt a sickness creep up her throat and flood her mouth with its bitterness. She did not want to think these things, feel these things, but her eyes were now locked on the boy, who had his own gaze locked on her husband, who was glaring back with an overcoming darkness.

"Wait…"

She tried to speak, but her voice was a mere whisper that fell amongst the shadows.

Luke, Lucas—

"You want a beating, huh?"

A man with winged shoes—

It was difficult to breathe.

White lace; she wears a dress of white lace—

"I'll teach you to be afraid."

An elfish smile; he makes her heart stop—

No more voices. Only the cries of a fallen child.

A set of pink pearls, glimmers in the moonlight—

The child was crying.

The light caches a glass; shards of sunshine dance—

She heard cruel laughter. Pain. Red pain.

The wine is rosy, red, red, like a flower—

The child was crying.

Where is he going—?

A hand swung by, missed her, collided with another face.

Where is he going—?

The child still cried.
Pearls clatter to the floor, like droplet of rain water—

A darkness wrapped around her brain. She thought she might pass out.

A palace on a mountain—

Desperate fingers reached out for her lifeless hand.

He left for a palace on a mountain—

"Stop it!"

Andromeda fought through the bindings of memories, struggling to keep her head over the tide of pretty images that had left her to wither. The present came crashing down upon her all at once, an ugly gray spatter, choked with uncorked beer bottles and husbands who grinned with cold eyes.

But then there was her boy, small, innocent; the embodiment of a past that would never return.

At his touch she felt a charge run through her, a vicious impulse, and the demon clicked its talons a little too loudly in her ears.

It happened in a blur. One moment the child was tugging at her fingers, the next he was sprawled across the floor.

Lucas sneered. "Good job."

Andromeda did not answer, did not look at him; her gaze instead fell upon the boy who lay crumpled at her feet, breathing slowly, his eyes closed. A flurry of panic closed around her heart.

How had he gotten there?

What had she done…?

Later tonight, when the moon has cast its silver shadow across dilapidated buildings and the shards of her glass bottle glitter sickly green in the dark, Andromeda will stagger to his bedroom and whisper through the crack in the door. She will sing a soft lullaby about winged shoes and never ask for forgiveness. He will sit with his ear pressed against the wood and listen intently, accepting an apology that would never come.

They both knew it was there.

"Heaven. What is heaven, Mommy? What does it look like?"

"You."