His voice stuck into the little boy's flesh like sharpened talons, sticking and slicing in near equal portions. "This again, boy?" Gumm hissed, fists full of a shirt collar that wasn't his own. "What have I told you about wearing that sort of clothing?" Despite the atrocity of such accusations, Bubba cleverly held his tongue, staring back at the angry man with as much composure as his tiny body could manage. If you stare at someone long enough, you can begin to stare through them. This strategy had spared the youngster on more than one occasion.
"That woman bought you this, didn't she?" The small child still spoke not a word, debating whether or not it was even worth shutting his father up over. He absolutely despised the way Gumm spoke of his mother, refusing to even refer to her by her name, or without a look of pure, unwholesome, disgust sewn tight onto his face like some preposterous quilting job.
She herself wasn't that lovely of a woman, but she had also never so much as laid a hand on Bubba. For the most part, this was the way in which he rated those around him, on the basis of how much physical pain they caused.
"Pink," he spat, "It's the color of queers, you know. They're going to take it as an invitation, and they're going to try and take you away from me."
To deconstruct his statements, to try and give them any sort of meaning or relevancy, would be a wast6e of time. It was just another one of his many delusional ramblings, another idea that he had gotten into his head God knows how. And for whatever reason, managing these worries fell onto the shoulders of his eight year old son. So he tried to speak with subtle precautions, lest his tone imply a ripe attitude.
""I really don't think-"
Gumm released his hold on the boy, watching his tiny erroneous body slip from the aging man's fingertips like soap from a water stricken palm. His son appeared to wince as he hit the solid ground, and the pained noise was an electric shot to the man's heart. Violence was his narcotic. The wanting. The taking. The control of it all.
"Exactly. You don't think. You need someone to spoil and baby you, and when they do, you still can't keep that pretty ass of yours in line. Do you want to get punished, is that it?"
The father retrieved the mass of tangled limbs off of the floor, forcing the boy back into a more graceful standing position. "Do you enjoy the pain?" He taunted, shoving his face close to the boy's so that his putrid fish breath could be easily inhaled, spewing bits of slimy spittle onto his son's pale forehead and cheeks. But spit was nothing to contrast to all else he would be and had been subject to.
Bubba shook his head as well as he could given the lack of space, not trusting his voice to answer for him. Voices too often tremble and shake and betray their owner anyways.
But Gumm just laughed in response, more saliva slipping off the tip of his tongue and drenching his victim in bodily juices. As Bubba lifted his arm to clear his face, the cold and scratchy fingers latched onto his thin wrist, jerking it counter-clockwise until there was a loud snap and his hand hung loose.
"Liar."
His father always kept a small pocketknife on him, he used to whittle when he was younger, and for this reason he had gotten into the habit of "arming" himself at all times. It had never been meant for the boy, he would later swear, but in the moment, it was awfully convenient. The young lad was still staring wide eyed at his first broken limb, and for that reason he was not fully aware of the gleaming weapon's presence until it was buried in his stomach (among other places) and his sweet red blood hit the hardwood floor.
The man shook his head, then wiping the soiled knife on Bubba's shirt, or at least, the pieces of it he now held as his own.."I'm disappointed in you, boy. When you don't scream like you're sorry, it's hard to tell if I have made my point clear." The deep gashes in the boy's mouth made it hard to speak so he only remained exactly as he was left while the scolding continued, wrapping his arms as best he could round his cold and semi naked body.
The boy felt something small floating around the insides of his bloody mouth, and as his slit tongue brushed across its exterior, he realized it was a tooth. The adult one that had just finished growing in.
He spit the tooth unto the ground, watching it bounce several times as a thin trail of blood followed.
Not to worry, there would be more where that came from.
"Stop wearing pink, all the faggots are gonna target you. Is it that hard to follow a simple rule? Do you think you're better than my advice?"
The tooth had teetered off to one side, lying with its legs positioned toward the both of them.
There would be more.
Gumm left to watch his television then, just as he loved to do.