Ripples Across The Universe

The moon was absent that night. This was a night when the see lapped at the night sky. Kissing it gently until the dark heavens succumbed and there was no way of knowing where sky and ocean began or ended. The two lovers intertwined in a brief embrace that should have been desperate in its stolen transience, but was instead languorous and so hypnotically natural that Glen could no longer remember where the horizon should have been.

He stared out across the boat and lost himself in that distant lovemaking. The ebb and flow of the water underneath him gradually rubbed the boat away until he was floating in the depths whilst soaring in the heights. Pin pricks of light were eyes watching him solemnly. The universe witnessing the flare of light that was the blink of his life. He felt his insignificance and it imbued him with a power he had only ever suspected he held. The overwhelming, infinite universe welcomed him, awaiting the acts that were the dance of his destiny.

In another life, a realm so far removed from this place he suspected it to be a dream turned sour in the harsh light of reality, he heard muted sounds of destruction. Once, he would have winced at that cacophony of chaos. There was a time when he thought it was his place to stem that tide. He may or may not have been right. But in the end he was forced to acknowledge that to remain steadfast in his defence of hearth and home, and everything that made those things possible, would be a form of madness. He had to accept defeat even though it pained him to do so. Then he remembered that battles were lost in order to win wars. Conceding ground could be part of a plan that led an enemy to their downfall. Let them win, when what was really occurring was the prelude to a crushing defeat. Use the opponent’s momentum against them and bring everything to an end that heralded a fresh beginning.

Glen sighed a breath into the darkness before him. A notional final breath. A symbol of what was about to come. A moment of peace that he would hold dear for evermore. This moment was his. A reward even before the job was done. Sometimes, time flowed in the wrong direction. Sometimes, you had to take what you were given because the offer may never be made again.

“I have to say this is very unexpected.”

Reluctantly, Glen slipped from the reality he could have spent an eternity in. A sadness caressed his face and encouraged tears that he had to swallow back. He had had his moment. He could not muster the arrogance to think he would have another. That was an impossibility. He was entirely different now and the person he was, the person he had to be, was not welcome in that place of serenity and beauty. 

“Was there a problem?” he said to Shirley, whilst looking toward the closed hatch.

Shirley shrugged and moved her lips into an approximation of a smile. A well-rehearsed expression that, combined with her cold, scrutinising eyes, was designed to wound.

Martin was down there. 

Their son. 

Glen had struggled with those two words for over a decade now. Over that time, Martin had become something other and something else. He didn’t even bear a resemblance to Glen anymore. The transformation had been impossibly gradual. There was a warning of this dark transition, but it wore a disguise of lies. Even as Glen cast his eyes back along the path of their shared lives he could not discern it. Retrospect was itself a lie of sorts. The context of now distorting all that had gone before.

All the same, Glen was haunted by the thought that he should have known. His refusal to accept the worst had blinded him. And it had been used against him. Even now, he looked at Shirley and in seeing her for what she really was, still wished for her to be something better. Someone. Someone whole. The way she embraced her brokenness still shocked him, as did the way she drew him in with a promise of something good. A promise of love that had not once been fulfilled. 

Fool me once… Glen could not bring himself to complete the phrase. He had been fooled over and over again. But then, he hadn’t been fooled by anyone other than himself and his desire for things to work. His absolute need for love and the connection that would make his life and his very existence make sense. The connection that would alleviate the pain of his being. 

The one thing that Shirley had given him was pain. All she knew was how to take. She’d created an emptiness that terrified Glen. That void encompassed what had once been their son. Glen saw it pulsing within the boy. He felt it staring balefully through Martin’s eyes, even though the boy no longer looked upon him.

By the time Glen registered that something was wrong, he was reeling, drunk with confusion. He knew everything had gone wrong and that he would never have the words for it. He also felt it inexorably moving against him. There was a terrible darkness here and roiling within the darkness was a hungry shoal of lies. Before he even got to grips with what was happening in his own home he understood that there was no going back. There was no fixing this. And that he would never be believed. That last was a crushing frustration. He knew the truth, but no one would ever share that truth with him. They would prefer to go with the stories of the smiling liars. It was easier that way.

In these anguished times, Glen still found it within himself to give thanks for all that he had learnt. That in an abusive cocoon of lies he had discovered truth. And in that connection with the truth of the universe, he had found a way to live and that was all there was. The rest was just noise and chaos.

The hatch opened and Martin stepped up onto the deck. The boy who was the size of a man did not look at his father. Hadn’t truly looked at him for many a year. He preferred to look down into the depths of darkness that he’d latched onto and would never let go of. Shirley had shown him that place and convinced him that it was theirs and theirs alone. That they were special. Better than the rest.

Glen remembered better times. Shirley and Glen did not. They had burnt those memories away. The void required sacrifice and past and future were a part of that sacrifice. By the time Glen had noticed something was wrong, he thought that it was a simple case of parental alienation. That would have been bad enough. The thought of a parent weaponising their own child and using them in acts of petty revenge appalled him. 

Why people did these things was a mystery. That they hadn’t let go of a ball of pain and angst was apparent. People were really bad at letting go, even when they knew they were damaging themselves and others. After all this time, all Glen could say in answer to why? was that people did things because they could. They went with whims and urges and didn’t think and didn’t care. Consequences were for later and consequences were for other people.

Glen looked from Martin to Shirley. In the depths of his despair, when all he could see was their acts of cruelty and the coldness with which they operated in the world, taking a callous vengeance on innocents, he had thought he could not love them because they had ceased to love. That in being past redemption thanks to their total rejection of the world and all that was good, he could not relate to the monstrous that they embraced with a religious fervour, nor could he connect with the monsters they undoubtedly were. 

He had returned to this again and again. His struggle with the love of his wife and son troubled and shamed him. He could not give up. That was not an option. In a way, giving up like that would be to join them. But he understood that he could never join them. That they were as isolated as could be. He saw the divisions between them and also within them. All they had was their dark friend. A darkness that could never be a friend. A cancer that they fed and grew and wished to inflict upon him in their addiction for a fleeting buzz that they saw as validation of their betrayal of their very souls.

It had taken Glen an age to find their light. Diminished and impossibly small, but they were still there. Stars from a far off galaxy. Stars that were so far away now that Glen would be dead before he could reach them. 

Once he refound that light, Glen never lost sight of it. There resided his love for them. That was enough. That was all there was. He took solace from the fact that he loved them still. 

“Is it done?” Shirley asked Martin whilst staring at Glen.

“Yes mum,” mumbled Martin.

Glen nodded. He could make an educated guess at the destruction that Martin had wreaked below decks and he understood what purpose that was intended to fulfil.

“Don’t think we’re fools,” Shirley said in the cold monotone she reserved for Glen when they were alone together.

Glen smiled. He didn’t think they were fools, he knew they were and he knew that was the least of their worries. Their constant anger made them ignorant. Once he’d understood what they were and what they were about, they were simple to predict. They weren’t superhumans using mere humans as a supply to their addiction, they were no longer human. They had sacrificed their humanity to the dark gods. He could see it in their eyes. The emptiness beyond. There was nothing there anymore, barring the fading light of their souls. An eternal light that could never be extinguished, no matter what they did. That light held them anchored in a space that tortured them. They hurt themselves most of all, but blamed others for their pain. Never would they take responsibility for themselves or their actions. They thrashed about in the simplest of traps. Glen pitied them and their miserable existence.

Shirley scowled at Glen’s smile, “whatever you were planning, you’re screwed now. You’ve got no way of getting back to the harbour, not without the satnav.” She smiled that awful, predatory smile of hers, “not without Martin. You need him.”

Glen shrugged. Shirley had overplayed her hand, she just didn’t know it yet. Glen didn’t need Martin, neither did he need Shirley. They needed him. They always had. That was not to say that were he to go, they wouldn’t find some other poor sucker to draw in and latch upon. 

That wasn’t to say that he could just walk away. They would never allow that. His total destruction was their aim and if he were to leave, they’d throw everything they had at him and he doubted he’d recover from the smear campaign they concocted. Besides, he was too tired and worn out to start all over again, and maybe there was some belligerence there also. An unwillingness to allow them to win their awful game.

“You better take the rudder then,” he said to Martin.

Martin moved forward. Glen watched him. Head down, shoulders drooping. There was a brokenness conveyed in his entire demeanour, but Glen knew better than to underestimate the man. He was strong and he was vindictive. More than a match for most. He may look like a self-piteous loser, but as well as that martyr complex, he was possessed of a god complex and that made him proud and egotistical. That was one of his weaknesses.

Glen made to step away as Martin approached, but did nothing of the sort. The bowed head act unsighted the younger man and it was a simple matter of using Martin’s forward momentum to send him towards the edge of the boat. The wooden cudgel Glen had been concealing at his side completed the trajectory Glen had planned. He swung the extension to his left arm and it connected with the back of Martin’s skull with a sickening crack. 

Glen watched the thing that had once been his son go overboard. The thing that had been his son but had been broken and twisted into something dark, cruel and monstrous by his own mother. There was no movement from the monster to break its fall into the water, and this fascinated Glen. Survival was the monster’s prime directive. Martin was likely dead before he hit the water. If not, there was no one here to save him. He remained in dark isolation even at the very end.

Glen turned back to Shirley. Having her at his back even for that briefest of moments made his flesh crawl. She was as dangerous as they came. Even more dangerous than the monster she had made of their son, after all, she’d had far more practice. Her face was another mask. This one a mask of rage.

“How dare you!” she hissed, “he was mine!”

Glen met her murderous stare, but said nothing. He held himself in check. She’d just seen her son die and all she could say was that Martin was hers. Shirley was angry because Glen had dared deprive her of what she considered to be a possession. Martin was hers and hers alone. A toy to be used and used badly at that. Now she was without her favourite toy. Glen wondered at that, then realised that he should not. Shirley liked her toy, but she hated the boy.

He meant his silence to be reply enough, but the words came unbidden, “he was our son. He was a lovely little boy filled with love and joy. You took all of that from him. You took everything from him. You killed him long before today. I don’t know who did the same to you. You’ve never talked about your parents. Not really. Only that you had a bad childhood, which was an excuse for how you are and reason for me to be sorry for you. What I do know is that the same thing happened to you. All abusers were abused. We all follow the same patterns again and again. I wonder when it all went wrong? A hundred years ago or more? And ever since that initiating event, a parent has taken a bitter and twisted revenge upon their own child for the abuse they received as a child. And so it went on.”

Shirley trembled with rage. There was no mask now, and Glen saw her for what she truly was. Ugly, callous and venomous. Her mouth opened, no doubt to spout vile words. Glen spoke first.

“It stops now. There will never be another of your kind. Not in this family.”

She barked laughter of derision, “you’ll pay for this!”

“I already have,” Glen said quietly as he approached her.

“You wouldn’t dare,” she hissed as he stood before her.

But the time for words was over and he choked the last of them off. 

They say, that if you end a person the way Glen ended Shirley, you see the light of their life fade from their eyes. Glen stared into Shirley’s eyes and all he saw was her light. The light was all that mattered. He freed it from the prison Shirley had made for it.

Afterwards, as Glen looked up at the stars, he fancied he saw two more in the night sky. He didn’t have a clue as to how a sailor might use a scientific reference of the stars to navigate a boat. Even if he did, he would not have bothered with its use. He trusted those stars and he knew the universe had a use for him, so he allowed the stars to do their thing, guiding him towards where he was supposed to be next. He stared into the eyes that peered down at him and lost himself to them.

Free at last, all three of them. The release from a legacy of pain untethered him from the world and he drifted out and beyond this end. There was a beginning awaiting him somewhere out past those watching eyes. The water rippled and he was reflected a million times in those ripples. The ripples nearest to the boat faded even as a million more ripples travelled out across the entwined, night time lovers. What was done was done, now there was only the truth of the light and a love eternal.