Hello :)
I called the Joker "Jack" here because of reasons.
Beware of torture, child abuse, blood, horror, crying and lots of other bad things.
You've been warned!
The world sways like an ancient oak in the storm.
Muffled groans turns into roots, tearing from the earth. Clumsy, uncertain steps, as they slither snake-like across the floor remind of the wet rustle of leaves throwing themselves to the ground with a dying sigh.
The sound of an empty beer bottle as it encounters furniture and door frames with a clink can be imaginatively confused with the violent wind that roars through the oak's branches. Its thinnest foothills already bulge outwardly ,urged by the violence of storm and heaven.
Jack thinks of himself as one of those small twigs. They begin to break so easily.
He almost hears how the crack starts in the middle. First softly, barely a whisper. Then the wind rips more and more, the volume's whispering increases until the wood begins to scream in horror.
Only now, Jack recognizes the falling leaves whimper in the same rhythm.
Crying and whimpering. Whimpering and crying.
And Jack is sitting right in the middle of the two.
Hears it. Hears everything, even though he keeps his ears shut. There is no escape. No exit. Jack soon realizes that it's useless to close his ears with his hands.
Instead, he wraps his arms around his bent legs, moving backwards, making himself as small as possible.
There is no crying wood, there are no whimpering leaves.
The sounds, they all come from the same source.
Mama.
He knows that mom's screaming, but he doesn't say a peep.
Mama cries, but he doesn't lift a muscle.
Mama's voice becomes weaker. The boy doesn't want to hear Mama's voice.
He wants to know nothing of her suffering, know nothing that she is in pain. Know nothing about her anxiety.
Because he's afraid.
He can not bear his own anxiety, and certainly not Mama's.
That's why he dreams of an ancient oak in the storm. Of screeching wood and whimpering leaves.
A picture, far away from him, a scene that does not even have the intention to threaten him.
A place where no one can hurt him. Whether him nor Mama.
"Jack! "
Jack begins to quiver, but tries to remain as calm as possible.
He hears the blood rushing in his ears, the heart beating in his throat, making his breathing difficult.
He knows the babbling voice. He knows it since his birth. It's not always babbling, but mostly.
It does every night. Sometimes every day.
It doesn't belong to Mama.
Mama's voice is soft and gentle.
Jack loves Mama's voice. He loves it when she reads him a bedtime story just before he goes to sleep. He loves it when she ends up bending down to him and gives him gently kisses on the forehead, covering him with his blanket and lets the light of the bedside lamp on before she leaves the room.
Mama knows that Jack is afraid of the dark. She never wants him to be afraid.
She takes care of him, protects him.
Jack loves Mama. And Mama loves Jack.
Jack asks himself every now and then, if the other voice, the babbling, loves him too.
Loves him in the same manner as Mama does.
The other voice sounds rough and deep, very different from the Mama.
HehearsDaddy.
Daddy drinks a lot, since he has lost his job in the cement plant. This was three years ago. During this time, Daddy has become very irritable.
His hand often slips.
So mom says, if it is brought up from the neighbors, asking her about a black eye or a swollen upper lip.
The neighbors just nod then and pick up another topic quickly.
Jack realized very soon that it is unpleasant to them to go deeper into detail.
He once addressed the old janitor on it, for he did not understand why they at all. The janitor replied to him that they didn't really want to know where the bruises and colored stains were actually from. They feign sympathy, as the rule of decency commands them.
Jack thought this was a stupid rule that forced people to behave so weird.
The janitor only ruffled his hair lovingly and said he would understand it all when he became an adult.
Since then Jack doesn't want to become an adult anymore.
He doesn't want to behave weird and ask questions, the yes but should not be answered.
He doesn't depend on such stupid rules that make no sense.
Above all, he doesn't want to be like Daddydy.
And Daddy is an adult. And he's not nice.
He hurts Mama.
He hurts him too, but not as often as Mama.
When he comes home after a long day, smelling after bars and smoke, he puts up a fight.
He likes looking for a reason to strike.
Jack slowly believes that he finds it funny, because he smiles when he calls her bitch while he beats her up.
Opposite to this, Daddy can be really nice to him if he wants to.
Except for one or another beating.
Sometimes he brings him candy from his wanderings, sometimes even cotton candy. Jack is absolutely crazy about cotton candy.
Daddy knows that.
If Jack is eating cotton candy, Daddy puts him on his lap, whispering in his ear how fond he's about him again and again, and that he should smile, because Daddy doesn't like sad faces.
Jack smiles then, pulls the corners of his mouth high and doesn't stop for hours.
He has to smile, even if Daddy suddenly yells at Mama, because she had burnt the food(though that's not true).
He must smile, because he'll be punished otherwise. Because Daddy can get mad quickly when Jack doesn't do what he's told.
Jack is afraid of Daddy.
Even if he gives him sweets and tells him that he loves him.
This love is not like Mama's. It's bad.
For a few weeks Daddy constantly touches him on spots where no one should touch a child.
Even Jack knows that, because it is unpleasant to him, every time he is packed or cuddled from Daddy.
Besides packing and stroking he has done nothing.
Not yet.
And Jack has to smile all the time, like Daddy orders him. Otherwise it will hurt.
Jack is sure that it will hurt, no matter what Daddy does with him then.
And yet Daddy tells him that he loves him repeatedly. Very very much.
For years Jack doesn't know whether he actually loves or hates Daddy.
When Daddy holds him in his arms and brings cotton candy, he loves him.
When he has to watch how Daddy hits Mama he hates him.
Especially now he hates him.
Because today it's different.
Today, when Mama screams and whimpers and is so so afraid. Today Daddy goes too far, because she feels more pain than usual.
Jack is only accustomed to a conditional measure.
He leans his forehead against his knees and weighs himself absently to the cadence of his hysterical sobs.
His guilt.
This time it's his fault that mom has to suffer so much.
He had stopped smiling.
They sit at the table, all three. Poking quietly in their food.
Daddy suddenly asks what Jack wants to be when he grows up. Jack responds enthusiastically with clown.
He has been with his friends in the circus recently and Jack almost idolized the clown there, laughing tears.
Daddy also laughs now. But it is not a happy laugh.
It is derisively, because he laughs about Jack.
Calls him a daydreamer, a ne'er-do.
A wimpy, who'd never bring one to laugh.
Jack is shocked when Daddy laughs at him.
His own smile collapses.
He suddenly feels very small and humiliated.
And that makes him angry. Terribly angry, as only children are able to be.
In his anger, Jack tells his Daddy that he'd rather be a daydreamer than an old, no-good drunkard like him.
Abrupt silence fills the room and Jack realizes at the same moment, what big mistake he just committed.
When Daddy gets up, the table shakes and lets Jack's soup spill outside the plate.
Jack doesn't care, his appetite is gone anyway. Instead, a cold lump of fear fills his stomach and makes him feel dizzy. With a trembling lower lip Jack looks up to Daddy, who watches him scathingly. He raises his hand, wants to beat Jack.
Mama gets up and touches his arm before he can execute his plan. Daddy is angry, jostles her away. Mama falls hard on the ground, a short cry escaping her lips.
Jack is crying too because Daddy finally turns to him and grabs him by the shirt collar, lifts him up from the chair.
His face became red with fury, reminds of an overheated kettle.
Jack gasps, as the fabric pulls tight around his throat and it gets hard to breathe.
He already regrets having said anything. He should have left it with a silent nod.
Now it's too late.
From the corner of his eye he looks for help, to Mama, but Mama is not there anymore.
Within a few seconds, Jack feels even more miserable than before.
As recorded his hearing, such as drawer to drawer is torn, a clatter, a clang of metal.
It comes from the kitchen.
Daddy yells at him, shouts How dare you talking so disrespectful to me.
Then, Mama's voice.
"Let him go!"
A trembling in her voice is put forward the call, but the large kitchen knife in her hand gives her words the necessary seriousness.
Daddy turns his head and stares at her. Hatred is glowing in his dull, brown eyes.
Jack has inherited these brown eyes.
Daddy actually makes him fall and pounces on Mama, considering her with all sorts of swear words.
Jack gasps. Eagerly he sucks the oxygen out the air, filling his lungs with sweet life.
Aghast he looks to Mama who waves with the knife in her hands, trying to keep her raging spouse at a distance.
"Jack, run!" she screams. "Run and hide!"
Jack does not know what to do at first.
Then he pulls himself up, turns around and runs.
Runs out of the room, the two figures vanishing behind him in a mental fog. As he runs down the hallway, he hears Mama's screams and Daddy's cursing.
It accompanies him everywhere until he conjures up an image of sheer desperation which has nothing to do with this horrible situation, seems to be almost peacefully. Far away.
An ancient oak that is plagued by a storm.
"Ah, here you're stuck, damn brat! "
Jack's heart stops.
Daddy found him.
Jack has been hiding in the attic, but Daddy has found him anyway.
Daddy rises up the stairs, there is no other exit than the opening above the stairs.
Jack is captured.
With watery eyes he watches as Daddy climbs menacing figure, builds up in front of him. He holds something in his hand. A knife.
The knife that Mama has held in her hands before.
Jack is afraid.
On the other hand, Daddy seems to have satisfied his anger elsewhere, because he seems much calmer than Jack last saw him in the kitchen.
He grins when he catches sight of the cowering boy and walks up to him. He crouches, watching with blank pupils.
"I'm glad I found you. Shit, I've been worried! " he says, grinning even wider.
He stretches his hand after the boy, but Jack flinches. Daddy's smile freezes.
He skewed the head.
¨ You know, Jack, most people only show their true colors when you hold a knife in front of their face.¨ he says thoughtfully. His eyes are focused on the kitchen knife. "Your Mama was the same. All hat and no cattle. Whining like a baby. Therefore Mama was stupid. You don't want to be stupid like Mama, right? You're not a baby, are you?"
Jack doesn't answer.
The moon shines through a small window and illuminates the attic with sparse, white light. It reflects glistening drops on the wide blade. Thick, red liquid falls from its moistened tip.
Daddy notices it, wiping the knife poorly on his pants. When Jack sees this, he can no longer suppress his sobs.
Like a flood everything breaks out of him.
The fear, the nervousness, anger for himself, for Daddy, even for the knife.
He cries. Unabated, loud and shrill.
Mama. He wants to Mama.
"Don't cry, Jack." his Daddy instructs angrily and grabs the boy's chin, holding him tightly.
Almost tenderly he lets the sharp edge of the kitchen knife slide over Jack's trembling jaw.
"Why so serious? You're supposed to smile, my little clown." Daddy laughs, forcing Jack to open his mouth and strokes a finger across the soft, chubby cheeks.
"Smile for me, Jack." he says dreamily and makes the knife flash in the moonlight one last time before he shoves it into Jack's mouth and begins to cut.
"Smile for me."
Jack whimpers while Daddy pushes him into the bedroom.
Tears adorn his cheeks and his eyes glim in pure terror.
Somehow he knows that he won't like what Daddy has in store for him now.
It's dark, but he knows that Mama is no longer there to snap the bedside lamp. Never again will she read him a bedtime story, because her eyes stare empty and rigidly to a place that Jack can not reach.
He has seen it, saw her eyes when Daddy pulled him through the kitchen.
There, everything is red, so horribly red. The floor, dipped in a pool of anguish and tears.
Daddy's grip is iron and squeezes Jack's narrow wrist until it throbs painfully.
When they reach the bed, he pulls Jack to the mattress, pressing him flat on his stomach. As Jack tries to crawl away, he hears the metallic click of an unlocking buckle, the ratcheting of a zipper that opens.
Before he can reach the other side of the sheets, two rough hands grab him by the hips, tugging him back, pin him down firmly in place, followed by a heavy, panting weight.
Jack sees nothing, everything is black.
But he hears Daddy's hectic breath close to his ear, smells the alcohol in it. Fever and heat and nausea.
Daddy is above him.
Jack is afraid.
Jack is in pain.
Although he is in pain, it looks as if he would smile.
He is not able to do otherwise, because his lips are standing upward, burned up to his cheekbones.
His mouth is filled with blood and torments him with the bittersweet taste of rusty metal.
Jack spits, chokes. His hands feel jittery in the darkness, looking for support. The fabric they touch is wet and warm. Jack is disgusted by it and clenches his hands into small fists.
He notes how greedy fingers get lost under his shirt and scratch his bare skin.
He cannot get away. He's trapped under the cage of the taller body.
Jack smiles.
He smiles, even when he screams and he grins, even when he just wants to be dead.
He smiles while calling for Mama, but Mama is not coming.
She'll never come for help again. Jack remains alone. Alone with Daddy.
And Jack smiles.
He'll always smile after tonight, whether he likes it or not.
Hello :)
Any comments ? I'd love to read your opinions about this...
Greets,
RoseofBrisingr