Take it up With Misters Smith and Wesson

When I came home, I found Sophie standing in the gangway surrounded by a pack of growling dogs poised for attack. Sophie was standing very still, a funny little half smile on her face. She seemed confused by their snarling faces, torn between her love of dogs and the unmistakable threat in these ones – black lips drawn back, gleaming sharp teeth. Missy burst from behind the house, barking and snarling. I rant to Sophie and was inches from her when Missy’s chain stopped short, snapping her back. My heart hammered, expanded, threatened to blow. The mad gods turned toward Missy. I grabbed Sophie and jerked her body against me. We both jumped a bit when the frenzied pitch of my mother’s scream echoed through the gangway. She exploded from the side door. Armed with a broom, she swung wild, savage arcs at the mad dogs. All five of them snapped to attention. My mother, reckless and hulking, advanced, and they scattered, nails struggling for traction against the smooth, slippery concrete. I swung the gate open and they poured out. We celebrated like we’d just won a small library, hugging and hopping on our toes, clapping and smiling. Missy hopped happily around us, catching the mood.

When my dad came home from work, I wanted to run at him and tell him the whole story, but the moment he walked through the door my mom burst from the kitchen and threw a tin tea container across the room aimed straight at his head. He ducked; the tin soared through the air where his head had just been and smashed against the wall behind him. Leaves, shoots, and small, tight baggies of white powder burst from the can, scattering in all directions. Wide-eyed, jaw-dropped, he stared at the tin and mess on the floor. He looked up just in time to receive a back-handed blow hard enough to rock him on his heels, and he stumbled back. He went after her. She ran into the bathroom and locked herself in.

“You can’t hide this shit from me!” she screamed through the door.
I slapped my hands over Sophie’s ears and pulled her back down the hall into our room where I closed and locked the door. I heard my mom’s shrill voice through the door and my dad’s shouts in reply.

“Why did mom do that?” Sophie asked. She sat against the wall holding a doll, plucking out the hairs on its head one by one. I watched her hands, pink and small, dirt beneath her fingernails, carefully grabbing only one strand of hair at a time, jerking quickly with a snap of her wrist. Once the hair was free, she dropped it on her lap and set out for the next, close to the same spot where she had taken out the last one, creating a gradually expanding bald spot.

“She was mad. She found bad stuff dad was hiding.” I shuffled a deck of cards.

“Yeah,” she said.

I took out a stack of paper and our box of scissors and crayons. We spread out a blanket and got to work. Hours must have passed before my mom knocked on the door, asking us to come out for dinner. The contents of the tin had been cleaned up. The smell of toast and gravy wafted from the kitchen. My dad sat at the table, ladling white sauce with flecks of beef on a stack of toast. My mom went to the counter to toast more bread, and Sophie and I took our seats.

“Sit up, girls,” my dad said. He watched while Sophie and I straightened our spines and laid our hands in our laps; then he gave us a slight nod and lifted a forkful of dripping bread into his mouth, making sure to chew with his mouth closed. Table manners were highly important to my dad. My mom appreciated proper etiquette as well, especially in her daughters, lest we end up looking “trashy” to anyone.

That night after dinner Sophie, Missy, and I sat in our room going over the details of our adventure from earlier in the day. Downstairs, my mom’s muffled voice was growing louder. My parents had been drinking and smoking pot for the past hour and 47 minutes. I knew because Sophie and I were sent to our room the moment it started. My mom had been talking the entire time. Sometimes when she was high, a poetic gem within her would emerge and her eloquent, verbose speech would monopolize conversation, excluding my dad.

Her words seemed to forcibly anger my father. It seems to me that it would begin with a subtle uneasy feeling that spread outward from an inherent wrath; a hot, molten nucleic ire he stored deep in his chest. By the time it surfaced, he had been quietly disturbed for some time and the surge of rage seemed sudden, the unexpectedness of it confounding even him. My father, whether high or low, was never good with words. He had to fight everything with his fists.

“Beginnings and endings. They make life, which only exists in time, inherently tragic. Although sometimes I think there is a region of existence beyond time from which I came and to which I will return. Or, perhaps more acutely, a region where the idea of me exists currently and is expressing itself in various ways and places simultaneously, time and this self that I currently am being but one of them.”

“Cut it out, Christine.”

“What frightens me is that we are bound fast to the laws according to time: that everything in life has a beginning and an end. Everything. Who I love, what I know to be real, what I have will all be gone, will disappear or turn out to be illusory, and all that I contrive to gain will be taken away.”

“Enough with that horse shit now.”

“Even if you and I are together for this life, we will have separate and unequal durations.”

“I said shut the fuck up!”

“One of us will be gone and one of us will be left. I wonder if the one of us who is gone will be held within time somehow by—”

The beating started after Sophie had fallen asleep. I pulled the blanket higher up over her head and made sure our door was locked before I sat down to listen. The steel and concrete foundation of the building shuddered with the blows. Heavy thumps through the walls and floor, like a dumbbell falling from a shelf. There was something wrong, something lacking from the noises that usually accompany their fights. I heard no cries from her, no fighting back. No hurtled objects colliding with faces. Only the occasional grunts he made between fist falls.
After a while, I began to worry that he had killed her. I got up and it stopped. A thick sludge of silence rose into the grooves dug by the noises of violence in the air, like clotting blood filling an open wound. I listened hard. Nothing. I waited what seemed to be hours. Still nothing. At last I fell asleep next to Sophie, sandwiching her between Missy and myself.

That night I dreamed that I was in a crowd of people tightly filling a room whose floor was breaking away avalanche-like from the wall opposite one single door that seemed to be shrinking as I scrambled near it, fighting to get through, shoving and throwing elbows, even gouging out eyes to make people go down. When I finally reached the threshold and was about to step through to safety, I heard a shot and felt a bullet enter my back squarely between my shoulder blades. I was thrown forward on impact and as I reached to break my fall, I felt a second shot penetrate high in my left shoulder, then a third almost simultaneously in the back of my neck. Lying face down I felt the warm blood rise, breach the skin and spill down the slopes of my sides and neck to the floor where I saw the dark red puddle form and spread. I felt the pain acutely, struggled for breath while my lungs collapsed, and knew I was dying.

I woke up to the same sealed, airtight soundlessness that I had fallen asleep with. I crossed the hall to my parents’ bedroom door. Pushing open the door slowly, I looked in to find the shape of my mother alone beneath a heap of covers. Overflowing ashtrays and prescription pill bottles littered the night tables. My dad wasn’t there, which was not unusual; he often woke up before any of us and left the house without making a sound. I saw a glint of sun bounce off metal on the nightstand. A gun. A hand-held revolver lay perpendicular to the bed on the table to the right of it, partially covered with cigarette ashes, handle facing my mother. I stared for a moment and then winced, remembering my dream. I drew back as if being pulled from the threshold and into my room where I relocked the door.