Ben Powers
3/7/06
C2
Violence Story
The Song Remains the Same
Ca-Chunk, the door latched behind me as I half-heartedly scraped my feet over the worn, moth eaten doormat, caked with the mud of ages."Im home!" I shouted as I walked into my room and shut the door, half blue and half chipped polka dots of wood that glared through the paint like Medusa's gaze. I punched the inch long metal rod that shot from the wall, the cap that served as a button was long gone.
I padded across my carpet and went to shut the blinds to minimize the amount of sunlight coming in, the sun was bright in the afternoon and it hovered at just the right height to blast my room with the full force of it's eye withering rays. I then turned on my music and went to the bathroom.
The journey across the hardwood floor hall was less eventful than I expected, since my mom wasn't home. My feet crunched over the dirt that lay over the hardwood floors in a thin layer, like a stamp on a letter, not to thick but always noticeable. As I entered the bathroom I gazed stonily back at the dirt streaked mirror. My reflection stared back. Brown eyes shallowly set back in a ruddy red face. A medium nose, and bushy eyebrows. Dark hair that wasn't short but not long either curled from behind moderately large ears, scarred on the earlobe from an earlier attempted piercing. With aggravation I stared at the newly formed pimple on my chin, as if it could detect the malice on my gaze and retreat back upon its self.
My name is Marcus, my last name doesn't matter. I live in a small, one story house with ten other beings. My 2 sisters, my mom, and my dad. Yes that's only five. We also have 2 lizards, 1 dog, and 2 birds. Not to mention the family of rats that call our crawl space home. My dad recently got laid off and is down at the unemployment office as I tell you this. I left the sanctuary of the bathroom and returned to my room to attempt my homework. The sunlight filtered through the blinds and revealed the dust that rose in plumes from the rug, almost so thick that you could taste it. With Heart Shaped Box blasting by Nirvana blasting form the stereo I sat down and did my homework.
I was halfway through math when I heard the latch on the screen door open. The door was pulled back on its rusty hinges, screaming like a stuck pig. I heard the work boots clomp into the hallway and the door being slammed shut. "Take the dog out!" the voice echoed through the house and vibrated through the walls, piercing the solitude of my room. It was my mother. Dejectedly I eased myself from my chair and went to take the dog out. While I had been working a light drizzle had started falling from the clouds, making the landscape slick with its icy droplets. The drizzle intensified as I opened the door and stepped into the increasingly dense wall of water.
Together Paleo(the dog) and I\ sludged through the rain and walked out onto the sidewalk. As I walked, I felt into my pocket for the pipe and the sack of herb I had snagged from my box before I left my room. The cool glass of the pipe presented a whole new way of looking at things, and the after affects would help when I got home. Paleo and I crossed the street and entered the park, making for the covered eating areas, eager to escape the downpour. The mud squelched around my feet and clung to Paleo's fur like molasses.
Though the park appeared innocent once you got back towards the unused area that image was less secure. The oddities showed themselves in bits and pieces: the needle that had gotten stuck before being sucked into the storm drain; the condom wrapper that had blown across the basketball courts, with rain plastering it to the wet cement; or the porno magazine and cigarette carton dumped carelessly in the trash bin. We reached the rear, the most covered area, and I sat down. I tied Paleo to one of the pillars supporting the building and emptied my pockets.
The back door rasped like a wounded snake when I entered. The house had awoken in my absence. My sisters scurried around like field mice, attending to chores. My mom was standing at the stove, still dressed in her overalls and work boots. I grabbed a rag from the pile by the door and mopped Paleo off. The burning scent of weed still hung in my throat like a noxious cloud. A minty piece of gum denied the escape of the scent from my mouth. I rubbed the dog till she was dry and then went into the kitchen to see what I could do to help.
The pot of simmering tomato sauce reflected my mothers mood .
"Hey" I said.
"What do you want?" she retorted back.
"Nuthin, just wonderin what I could do to help."
"Well there's always something to help with in this pigsty of a house!"
"Alright I'll fold the clothes." I walked out of the kitchen without waiting for an answer. I grabbed my clothes and the towels and went back into my room. I usually volunteered to fold clothes because I could listen to music and not be out there with all the hollering.
As I folded towels my mind drifted into the great sea where you are the master and yet the sailor at the same time. You control where your thoughts go, but the emotions of the thought control you. The sea can be peaceful and plesent or it can be dark and full of turmoil and waves. . As my mind went sailing I wandered across different memories. My mother's smiling face when I was younger. The loving face of a mother gazing at her firstborn, before life gets harder. A brisk wind kicked up, rushing my vessel of subconsciousness from the far to the near past. I saw my father rolling over in bed at 4 in the morning to answer the phone, only roll back over and cry. Then my mind went to the funereal of my last grandfather, my mom's dad. Whose death seemed to send my mom's ceiling of optimism crashing to the floor, finally broken by the cruelness of fate. Living in Atlanta had seemed a chore to her after that. She had tried to buy his house in Macon but the financial situation wouldn't allow it. My mind swept on to the first day of school. Things looked great. Then Sharon called and said she didn't want to go out anymore. Crash! My own ceiling of optimism shattered. All of these were reasons why I slowly drew inward and turned the other cheek to the world of reality and pain. I turned to the world of narcotics and a stretched sense of contentment, like a animal skin being stretched on the drying rack.
Knock! Knock! Knock! The solid sound of knuckles on wood sliced open my sea and I was sucked in a whirlpool back into reality."Dinner's ready!" yelled my mom. Anger welled up in me like the rising tide. She breaks me away from the world where I found solstice to tell me about food! This world had so little respect for the bigger things. Never-the-less, I left my room and went to the dinner table.
As soon as we all sat down the shriek of the front door marked my fathers arrival like a brand marks a cow."Oh my god, the man is home!" my mother exclaimed, her tone laced with disrespect. Words like that, between parents, bite farther and deeper into a child's soul than the incisors of the largest predator on Earth. After the damage is done there is a hole of emotional pain. Thus, the body takes over. Is it a healing solution or is it a venom? It numbs it. I had learned how to mentally block numb things last year. You wall yourself off from the words and don't take any of it seriously. You hunker down in your boat and ride out the storm. In the morning you won't remember the exact words spoken, just that horrible feeling of cowering behind a wooden wall while the stormy sea of the mind lashes at your sanctuary. Sometimes the argument would travel back into their bedroom. The place where they had once made love was now where it was steadily unraveling. From there the words would be blurred, like looking through scratched plexiglass. Yet no matter how blurred it was the guttural and harsh hate resonated through the and grated on the ears and heart. I moved out when I was 16.
Honk! The long blast of the car horn next to me snapped me back to the rain soaked interstate. Now im 21,and 5 years later, tears still welled in my eyes as I remembered those days. I wiped them away, determined not to let emotion get the better of me. If there was one thing I learned from my parents it was this. The war of the gods of the household crushed the fledgling soul beneath it. And today I was returning to the god's domain. I turned off the highway down
and exit ramp, my car sliding over the wet concrete. I turned down a residential street, skirted a newly fallen tree and slowly turned my car into the driveway. I got out of the car and slammed the door. Rain pelted my shoulders, drenching my clothes. I walked up the overgrown path and opened the front door. Ca-Chunk.