An Eldian's Journal

Chapter 6: A sharp hat—A common quarrel

Before the events of my hallucination could be finished, my vision started crawling back to me. The edges of objects started going off in their separate ways, back to where they belonged. The needle-filled pain at the back of my head dulled out and life crawled into my limbs again.

I was back in my parents' bar in section F.

Back to the blood-soaked air.

As I rolled onto my stomach on the floor, a thought sprouted in my mind regarding the hallucination: 'Was that the future?' However, that strand of thinking was interrupted by a few things:

1. Curved wood was sprinkled next to me

2. Two middle-aged men

I picked up the pieces of wood that were lying to the left of me. But as my cognitive processes gradually returned, a realization of what it used be silently crawled up my spine. One of the pieces of wood was long and there were thin bars that laid across it; it was a riverbed for strings. When my senses fully returned, the realization hit me harder than the bottle that blessed the back of my head from earlier.

I hugged the dismantled corpse of my guitar graciously as I recollected the haunting sounds of its destruction from earlier.

I finally had an image for those thuds.

Still holding onto the broken off fret board of my guitar, my water-logged face gazed upon a situation similar to what I had experienced in my hallucination. The difference was that I was watching from third person. My papa laid on the floor a few meters from me. A mud-stained shoe was moving up and down stamping dust and pain onto his spine. Attached to the shoe was a devil that was still possessed by emotions: fear and anger. It was Dick the cabbage man. On the floor to the right of him, an ivy hat sat waiting while carrying a blood-thirsty blade in its rim.

"Papa?" The two-syllable word wiggled out my heavy lips.

I looked around the room with my eyes begging for help. But the bar by that point was half empty; those that stayed stapled themselves along the walls as bystanders. They were truly dominoes. They had fallen in the chain reaction started by the broadcast and they had done their deeds. So, they simply stood there, embodying uselessness. Among them, stood a metal-faced woman: my mama. Her eyes were louder than ever for they were beating furiously in their sockets. Next to her stood Lina; she held her broken arm as if she was afraid it would fall off.

'Why aren't they doing anything?' I thought.

So, I did what any 14-something year old would do:

I took matters into my own hands.

Using my sluggish legs, I lifted my body off of the cursed floor and my head raised into the clouds of dwindling violence. I gripped my guitar's detached fretboard as hard as sleepy fingers would permit. I pasted my eyes onto the cabbage man while carrying my 'Warhammer'.

I'm sure it looked intriguing from 3rd person—A devil spawn dashing towards a full-grown one with malicious intent.

***AN ANTI-CLIMAX***

I barely ran one meter before I slipped on some shards of glass and toppled over.

(I would have given more description of this, but pitiful actions don't deserve much description.)

My papa swiveled his head slowly towards me. There was a swamp in each eye, and he breathed like a fugitive. "…Heinrich…"

All I was able to do was watch the remainder of the scene, on the floor, like a domino that had already fallen in the long-chain reaction of that night. Next to my head were corpses of words that were said earlier and left on the floor.

The cabbage man's face was still tomato red. It was as if all his anger, all his fear for the future of the world was scrunched up in his cheeks, forehead, and eyes. Those eyes carried an impassioned flame. He yelled, "They're gonna kill us, Freddy! How can you support them?!" I'm sure Papa wanted to say he was scared too. But he didn't need to, for it was already written legibly on his face with a blood-red marker.

The cabbage man grabbed papa by his thinning, dirty blonde hair, revealing a retreating hairline for everyone to see. Papa continued chanting "I-I hate them..I-I hate them" as if it were a prayer for the cabbage man to let him go. He said those words so many times by then that the meaning was sapped out leaving the words themselves naked, wearing dulled edges.

Making sure his devil claws were still stamping onto papa's back, Dick the cabbage man used his calloused right hand to reach for the hat. The tips of his fingers flirted with the brim of it momentarily, but he managed to grab it. He brought it over to papa's forehead with the blade in the brim salivating in anticipation. Papa wriggled underneath like an earthworm at the mercy of a farmer's boot. His vibrating eyes tracked the blade as it approached its destination.

Within those two seconds, a fire lit a piston in my lungs expelling and taking in air. With each shallow bellow, my breath repeatedly pierced the air as a petite dagger. Finally, there was full-blown combustion as the engine that was my lungs erupted.

"PAPAAA!"

The blade sunk its teeth into papa's forehead, above the mountain top wrinkle, and closer to the scalp. With excitement, it rolled horizontally along with the hibernating hair follicles, annihilating them for good.

***FIVE ETERNAL SECONDS***

The five seconds that proceeded that moment overstayed their welcome. But when they finished, they left their suitcases in the room and left.

Papa looked at the edge of his eyebrows to catch a first-person perspective of the bloodstain that was signed across his forehead. The downpour of blood sliding down the aged hairs was the rain, and my screams were the high-pitched thunder.

There was a storm in section F that day.
It was not just from outside.

As me and mama coated the wall generously with our bountiful screams, the cabbage man looked at his hat; poisonous devil blood was infecting its grey woven threads. It was odd, however. Past my waterfall of tears, it appeared that the impassioned flame finally went out in the cabbage man. I managed to make out movements from his lips. Yet, there was no audio to sync with it. There was a hole in his face, however; it was very neat and very precise.

He ran out of the bar.

Was there enjoyment in his eyes? I am not sure even as of the time I'm writing this, 4 years later. All I remember is that the blinds were shut over his face and the blade's thirst was quenched.

It appeared that he cut himself when he cut papa. Yet, the blade only bore the latter's crimson.

Mama unstapled herself from her position and yelled "GET OUT! ALL OF YOU! GET THE FUCK OUT!" Most of the customers that left the bar had taken their things with them. Some left their blood on the ground.

Devil blood oozed from papa's fresh gash as if it was aching for freedom for so long. My limb still hadn't wakened up fully, so I used my right hand and dug my fingers into the grooves in between the wooden planked floor to approach papa. After a few feet, my hand-cut on some of the pieces of glass. The blood was a dash of paint to add to the canvas that was the bar's floor. It was a fine collection to the wide variety that the customers willingly donated.

Mama grabbed Lina's good arm before the girl could leave. She left dents in it.
"No dear, you're staying with me." The words left bite marks on Lina.

Mama morphed her non-occupied hand into a metal fist and bashed it at her own face a few times.
"Ok Rosa, stop crying. It's time to take care of these fools."
A tear made a mistake of rolling down her face, so she did what any middle-aged barkeeper would do: she wiped it off with a punch.

They ran over to me. Instead of them helping me over to papa, Mama wiggled my armband off and then took her own off as well. They then bounced over to him. While papa's head rested on the floor, mama pressed the armbands onto the wound. The star symbols woven into both of them consumed the blood and dressed themselves in faint crimson. It represented our people's legacy quite well.

(If there's one thing I learned from that day, armbands aren't just great for discrimination. They make for great napkins. )

"Oh Rosa…when did you get so pretty?"
The pervert's delirious eyes were aimed at Lina. He then rose his sinful right hand over to her face, but mama sharply flicked it away. As a bout of revenge, she simply returned with extra pressure on the wound.

"OWWW!"

After a few minutes of applying pressure, mama dropped a caution-filled complaint onto the floor while standing up. "Dammit. There's too much blood."

She told Lina to keep the pressure on the wound before she walked over to the bar counter. With a 100-pound weight on her face, she wallowed in the predicament handed to her. After looking hurriedly around the bar, her now less than iron hands grasped a cheap bottle of alcohol.

She said, "Let's go back home. You're coming with us, Lina."
"Mrs. Steiner. Viktor's at home by himself."
"Look at your arm! He can wait."

Upon our arrival home, Mama turned on the lights and set my delirious Papa on a rarely used chair in the living room. It creaked angrily as if it was ashamed it had to hold up papa's rear end.

"Heinrich, go fetch the sewing kit, will you? Quick!"
In between mama's urgent calls, Papa made an honorable request.
"Could you…get my…magazines please?"
Mama applied another cut on Papa with her words this time around.
"Of all the times…you want to be a perv now?!"

Before I could dash out, she said something once more.
"And there's something else I forgot." She turned towards Lina and provided her with a nice and crisp complimentary slap across the face.
"Mrs. Steiner?!"
"I wanted to hit Heinrich's Papa but he's hurt now. So, I hit you instead…you deserve it anyway…"

As mama focused on stopping the bleeding from Papa, Lina locked her eyes on the ironwoman; there was no sense of dejection on the girl's face. Diamonds can't be damaged after all.

After digging through cobweb-infested cupboards, I returned to the living room with a small green box along with a frail cloth to form a makeshift cast for Lina.

"I found it m—"

"Gimme that!"

Mama set the sewing kit squarely on the table next to the complaining chair. She then picked up the golden bottle of alcohol she brought from the bar.

Papa spoke through his sleeping lips.
"Is that for me for to drink, Rosa?...I knew you were always..sooo kind."
"No, fool."

Mama looked around the room irritably for a lid opener but simply shrugged. She then shoved the bottle into her left set of teeth and popped the top off.
Papa opened his stubbly jaws as if he was expecting the numbing sensation of some of his bar's fine alcohol. Instead, his forehead cut received a handkerchief drenched in golden brown. Along with it, a punctuated sting.

"Owww! Rosa!"

"I have to clean the wound. Who knows where that blade had been?"

"I don't know."

"Well, it's been in your forehead. That's for sure."

She then handed him the whole bottle of golden-brown liquid. As he drank the poison, his adams-apple rose up and down passionately.
"Keeping drinking. You're going to need it."
Papa pulled the bottle from his mouth, sighed, and wiped his lips with his sleeve. "-Huh? Why?"

Without allowing the distraction to go to waste, mama speedily opened the sewing box. From the palette of strings and needles, she briskly picked out a skinny needle and some mediocre strength green string. Her sewing art commenced. The blank canvas: a perv's forehead.

"OWWW!"

Mama stuck the intruding needle into the jagged lips of the gash that sat clotting on Papa's forehead. Mama would usually take pleasure in getting revenge on her less-than-honorable husband. However, this time the 100-pound weight on her face could not provide a second of relief.

While Mama worked her magic, I was putting together a makeshift cast for Lina's less than functional arm. While I was fiddling around with the cloth, she grinned as if she was getting some sort of amusement from this.

"You're getting taller, Ricky. You're almost as tall as me now."
I scoffed, "Ricky?... Leave me the hell alone."
She clicked her tongue. "Entered the rebellious phase, I see."

More like the 'my guitar broke, and my dad got hurt so I'm pissed' kind of phase.

In between grimaces of pain, as the needle and string repeatedly entered the edge of papa's scalp, he was able to ask mama a question.
"Is that needle sterile?"

"I don't know…But I'm sure you are."

Papa grimaced once more. "You always have something snarky to say. OWW! Don't you, Rosa?"

An abbreviated grin flickered on mama's rusty lips. That was probably the first bit of agreement they had in a while. "Indeed I do."

After mama sealed the jagged lips of the gash on papa's head, a final "oww" escaped from his mouth accompanied by a sigh of relief. On his freshly sown forehead, an emblem laid itself as a burden to carry: a lightning bolt. A smeared, cherry red outline surrounded it.

He looked up at the ironwoman in front of him. Sanity had returned calmly to his blue eyes while he spewed words of a sobering truth.

"You could have saved me back there…"

"…"

"You could have saved me back there, but you didn't. I could have died, but I didn't. What happened…is just what happened."

"…I don't regret anything." The hollow statement slipped out of mama's rusty lips, yet it was in disagreement with the weight that strained the creases on her aging face.

***A COMMON HUMAN QUARREL***

'Why didn't I help?'

I'm sure that's what mama asked herself that night.

When I was in my primary school years, I used to ask her odd questions during breakfast. One of them being, "Mama, if someone tried to hurt me. Would you let it happen?"

She would crease her eyebrows every time acting like she was surprised by my asking weird-ass questions.

"Of course I wouldn't let it happen."

"How about Papa?"

She would look over at the perv who was usually sitting outside on the porch reading his advanced literature. With her morning face, she would say, "I wouldn't let it happen to that fool either. Even if a titan came after you all." And like always, the rusty lips would melt into a warm smile.

Everyone thinks they know what they're going to do until it actually happens. I'm sure Mama realized that night that she was a woman that would watch the spills take place and clean after them. Rather than stopping the spill in the first place. It didn't matter how much of an iron façade she put.

On that night, she looked over at me. Words spouted from her mouth; they were smooth, like maple syrup.

"It'll be alright, Heinrich. Okay?"

"…Yes, mama."

Your words were weightless mama.
Was what happened months later, alright?