*Excerpt* Episodes of a Slowfade: Hell is on a Sunday

EASTER IS five points of hell delivered in fourteen words and the cracking of plaster beneath your brother’s head.

The day starts with a two hour church service about forgiveness, about renewal – everyone seems to have acknowledge the message but him. Once home you are a quiet calm with a turbulent underside. The heels on your feet make you unsteady, make the world pitch and sway as you try to keep your balance.

Four hundred and fifty five.

Four hundred and fifty six.

Four hundred and fifty seven.

Your father is sitting on the sofa, drilling you and your mother and your brother with a domineering gaze, brow lifted in disdain as he demands keys he makes no attempt to find himself. Something violent is rolling beneath your skin as his words cut and strike your family. Temper has always been a quiet battle for you, a vault in your chest, prepped and ready for the blossoming of your anger so that it remains hidden and mundane, so that it doesn’t take shape and reality. You had always known how to keep it silent. Until now. Until the day of the betrayal. And you had tried, were trying, to keep it rained. If only for your mother’s sake. But the condescension oozing from your father are strings of potential coming together, tightening to unbearable pressures, and you aren’t sure how much longer you can stand it. When your mother has been reduced to tears and apologies, when your brother explodes into epithets, you finally find the damn keys and throw them wordlessly at him. You stalk from the room and down the hall, needing to get away, to be anywhere but in this house, inside walls imbedded with screaming, walls that go on forever, reaching up and up and up, but collapsing around you so that breathing is impossible. You need to breathe so badly. Leaving sounds wonderful, freeing, a gulp of fresh air to clear your head, but leaving your mother and brother alone with him strikes you as abandonment. You know how that feels all too well.

Soon hell festers in overly loud syllables that ricochet off the walls of the house like bullets. You try to ride out the barrage in your room, counting the seconds that documents the violence of the voices on the other side. You trace over the black curves of words you wrote on your walls to remind yourself, to comfort yourself; they mock you now. You mouth the names of every book on your bookshelf, open the last page to recite the number, attempt to trap the crazed winged thing in your chest in the titles. Shivers befriend your limbs and knowing taps on the window with the heartbeat of the sky as it pours down. Something is going to happen something is going to happen something is going to happen, you know it you know it you know it. You can’t not know it. It’s happened too many times before. The shadows are buzzing in delight, prickling your skin with a thousand and one thorns of defeat and helplessness, and they cackle as you try to catch the drops of red before they can leave your body and cover the floor in something that feels like the absence of safety.

You try to pray. Two hundred and thirty five seconds you try to pray before the yelling quiets. The blood in your veins slow, expanding as it freezes and you almost scream from the pain of it. Eyes clenched tight, body ridged, jaw close to cracking.

On the other side of the wall, fifteen feet by twelve feet, you can make out the broken pieces of your mother. You can picture her sitting on the bed, hands to her face – the image is a shattered window that fills your mouth with glass. Swallowing is near impossible and you choke over and over again.

There are twelve heartbeats between silence and the explosion. The roar of a hurt teen rolls like thunder with the promise of lightening down the hall and into the walls of your chest. The lightning strikes the floor and sets the carpet ablaze in the single high decibel of the slamming door. Your mother is screaming now, the screeching that comes only from the mouth of a mother whose offspring is in danger. The sound unhinges your joints, cooks them over a two hundred degree furnace and asks you to still stay calm. You can’t. You bolt. You fling open your own barrier, only to find your brother’s closed blocked unmovable, you can’t get in and bellowing is rumbling the thin grains of wood meant to give it substance. You can see them vibrating apart and together and every direction but open.

You howl, beat the door till it bites the skin of your hands and they run red in your panic. Bruises flower across your shoulder as you put your weight into it, gain a glimpse of five fingers around a thin neck, angry brows bolted down in bars of rage and contempt, spittle flying from your father as he shoves your brother into the wall, past the wall, into unforgivable. You are a crazed animal as you try to gain entrance, to pilot the situation away from the inevitable conclusion. When your bones splinter and cry, when your shoulder snarls in near defeat, you manage to gain entrance. The door jam grabs your skirt, a vain attempt of the shadows to stop you. You don’t even hear it rip.

There are a words in your chest, shrill screams in your throat and curses on the tip of your fingers that you dig into your father’s back. He tries to shove you off, but dread has morphed to panic, solidifying muscles, strapping any design that would have let you cower before his temper. You never thought you could hate someone so much as you do in that moment. Heat and hatred blooms like a tide of blood that roars in your ears and thrusts you forward.

“Get off of him!” You snarl you scream you yell you hate. You are beautiful vengeance that has never felt uglier.

For the first time since that January morning, you feel the ground solidly beneath your feet; it doesn’t shift or sway, you’re running and you’re gaining ground. The mountain has become tangible events and you’re going to plow right over them. Your father twists out of your grasp, you shove him again, uncaring about the hundred pound difference between he and yourself. All five foot two inches of you splits the forces in half as you step between your brother and father. When he is in the hallway, caught beneath the horrified gaze of your mother, strangled beneath your gaze that feels deadly and dangerous and pulsing with the potential to snap, he shrugs, shoulders full of wires that you can hear snapping beneath the jaws of the evil he has brought into your home. His eyes are smoldering indifference. Your mother’s eyes are wide orbs of fright and terror and disbelief, wounded something that you refuse to identify and sympathize with because she brought him back. And your eyes, your eyes are closed fists yearning for flesh to render beneath them. You want to rip his throat out with your teeth.

“Get out of my way,” he growls in your face, all teeth. You don’t move, can’t really. “Maybe I had it right the first time, I should never have come back,” he says.

Gravity stills and you are weightless, suspended in that moment. He keeps his eyes locked on you. You count the ragged breaths coming from behind you. It is the thing you anchor yourself to. Your lips curl back, piles of trial-tested bravado and dominance that challenges him. His words are skittering over your skin like cold electricity, but you refuse to acknowledge them. You are aggression and exhaustion and pieces of adult you weren’t ready for. You don’t care that he stands, twelve inches over you, staring you down for one second, two, four, eight, twelve, until sixty seconds has gone by, you haven’t breathed and you feel eternity is at your fingertips ready to slice his face off. He is the first to drop his gaze. The victory is hollow, shimmering and shaking with voices, tangible only to your inner thoughts, but physical as any blow. There is lava in his footsteps that smolders and destroys as he walks away. You stitch your eyes closed, blinding yourself to the world around you. But the choked sob of your mother forces you to unstitch and peel back your lids, to take in the colors that drip down the walls, the words that are peeling in ash like layers and littering the ground you walk on.

There is silence behind you. Your brother’s face is an etched map of stone hieroglyphs, moment of history that will never be erased no matter the counting of the clock. The hands will tick and tick and tick and carve nothing away, leaving an impermeable timeline he’ll never escape. Ground zeroes littered with shrapnel.

Slowly, on wooden legs, on joints that refuse to bend, on feet that float over nothing, you move back into your room. There are whispers in the dark corners of your head and they are threatening to asphyxiate you. They clatter through your ribcage, burning past your eyes, blurring the world in grays and lines that refuse to define themselves. Words are roaring in your ears and you’re fighting the compulsion to destroy the things around you. Everything is a rocking time bomb that you want to detonate, because surely the snap of the tension would be better than this. You are too full, too heavy, and there is no room left anywhere. You are screaming silently so that no one can hear. Your back bone is folding as you fight the salt sting of tears burning the back of your lids. Too much too much too much toomuch. You have grounded yourself in this one moment, circling frozen things so that you don’t shatter apart. But there is just too much.

A box on your bookshelf gives you an idea. Standing in the center of your room, pain from the heels that you never wear grounding you further, you begin imploring your mind to imagine nothing but boxes and an attic you can store all those voices and whispers and memories in. First you build the walls.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Air tight.

Windowless.

The boxes come next, a modicum of air entering your lungs as they form. Brown boxes, you think, un-extraordinary. Blocks of concrete, unbreakable. Empty blocks and boxes that you can stuff away the whispers. Hide them. Silence them. You create boxes but they begin to deteriorate, so you force others to take their place. You build and build and remain unmoving until there are enough boxes to hold all the things haunting you. And then you stand there trying to wrangle the whispers into their new homes. You are wrapping and chaining and trapping and beating and fighting everything into four small walls without windows without doors without any way of exiting. And you’re binding the feelings in concrete, quick sealing. The phone on your bedside table begins chirping. You unlock yourself and answer. Your friend’s gay voice echoes around the attic now loaded and littered with boxes.

“Hey, how is your Easter going?”

The feelings riot at the question. It takes you no more than eleven heartbeats to wrangle them into submission; you think you have them all, nothing is leaking, the corners are sealed tight. But one escapes – one whisper, one hot dagger of regret despair defeat trickling down the plains of your cheek were it meets a smile that’s as false as anything man-made. You swallow, clear your throat.

“Great,” you say, you lie. You wish he didn’t believe you.