Hanukkah 4
Zach wasn't going to move.
He wasn't going to do anything, besides sit on his parents—mother's—mother's couch and get shitwrecked until he passed out, or better yet, died and erased his pathetic existence from the entire world. Fortunately, his mother was trying to prevent that from happening, although she couldn't do anything about…anything else.
She touched his shoulder gently as she rose from the couch. "Zach, let's light the Menorah. Sun's down and you haven't eaten all day. You're getting too skinny, you'll get sick. Come on, come on."
"I'm not in the mood, Mom," he muttered, keeping his eyes glued to the television. Another swallow of scotch followed. "I want to see how Stabler solves this one."
His mother turned away, shifting around as she tried to get her bearings around the uneasiness that had settled into their dynamic. Before, she would boss him, and guilt him, and either had about a fifty percent chance of working, depending on his sobriety levels, but now she would push gently, unsure of what would set him off. It wasn't like her to tread lightly. It was revolting.
She tried again. "Your father would—"
The first two words drilled into him like a battering ram, and he resisted the urge to punch something just to watch it shatter. "MOM."
His mother jumped back, and he supposed he should feel guilty about that, if he could feel. "Don't fucking tell me what Dad wants because he's not—" The words got stuck in a sudden wave of heat coming from his chest. "Stop tell me what he would and would not fucking do! You always do that like—like he's—" Swallowing around the lump was useless. "You know what? Fuck this."
He kicked over the ottoman as he stormed out of the house, blind to his mother's breakout sobs. The back porch was covered in a layer of freezing white powder--and he was clad only in a tshirt and jeans, no shoes--but he couldn't feel the piercing cold of the winter air as he collapsed in deck chair. The tightness contracting in his throat was so intense that he could barely breathe around it.
He leaned forward on his knees and tried to make his hands stop shaking. They stopped, but the rest of him didn't.